Re: [suse-autoinstall] autoyast beginner question
All you need is to autoinstall=nfs://x.x.x.x/installsource/autoinst.xml on your install kernel command line. autoyast=default will not pick up a file called autoinst.xml Best, Yan
Rainer Krienke <krienke@uni-koblenz.de> >>> Hello,
I am using opensuse10.0 at the moment. i do installations of hosts usually via NFS which woks fine. What I wanted to achive is that when an installation starts a certain set of packages is used for this installation without the need to go into the yast menues an select the packages I would like to install. So i created my own package selection and integrated it in mediaroot/suse/setup/descr/ . Manually I can activate this package selection in yast. Now I would like to automatically select this package selection when yast starts up in an installation process. So I thought I create a autinstall.xml file containing code to select my package selection and then go on installing like usual. The autoinst.xml file is very simple (created by yast autoinstall): <?xml version="1.0"?> <!DOCTYPE profile SYSTEM "/usr/share/autoinstall/dtd/profile.dtd"> <profile xmlns="http://www.suse.com/1.0/yast2ns" xmlns:config="http://www.suse.com/1.0/configns"> <software> <addons config:type="list"> <addon>Min</addon> <addon>uniko-4.2</addon> </addons> <base>Minimal</base> </software> </profile> I put this file in the root directory that I specify for NFS installation. When I now start an installation and say autoyast=default on the kernel commandline autoyast comes up and at the point of "Steuerdatei abrufen und einlesen" it asks me in a dialog Box for "Pfad für Systemprofil" (Path to system profile). And now I actually do not know what autoyast needs? I thought my autoinst.xml file is the system profile needed? But it seems there is something more? Can anyone help Thanks Rainer -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rainer Krienke, Universitaet Koblenz, Rechenzentrum, Raum A022 Universitaetsstrasse 1, 56070 Koblenz, Tel: +49 261287 -1312, Fax: -1001312 Mail: krienke@uni-koblenz.de, Web: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke Get my public PGP key: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke/mypgp.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Donnerstag 20 Oktober 2005 12:40, Yan Fitterer wrote:
All you need is to autoinstall=nfs://x.x.x.x/installsource/autoinst.xml on your install kernel command line.
autoyast=default will not pick up a file called autoinst.xml
Thanks for the answer. But always typing the complete ip and nfs path for each installtion is again annoying and error prone. In this case it would be easier to manually select the software selection in yast which after all was what I wanted to avoid. Is there no way to have autoyast search the file on the installation media (NFS dir in my case)? Thanks Rainer -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rainer Krienke, Universitaet Koblenz, Rechenzentrum, Raum A022 Universitaetsstrasse 1, 56070 Koblenz, Tel: +49 261287 -1312, Fax: -1001312 Mail: krienke@uni-koblenz.de, Web: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke Get my public PGP key: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke/mypgp.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hi, Am Donnerstag, 20. Oktober 2005 12:55 schrieb Rainer Krienke:
On Donnerstag 20 Oktober 2005 12:40, Yan Fitterer wrote:
All you need is to autoinstall=nfs://x.x.x.x/installsource/autoinst.xml on your install kernel command line.
autoyast=default will not pick up a file called autoinst.xml
Thanks for the answer. But always typing the complete ip and nfs path for each installtion is again annoying and error prone. In this case it would be easier to manually select the software selection in yast which after all was what I wanted to avoid. Is there no way to have autoyast search the file on the installation media (NFS dir in my case)?
If your machines can boot from floppy you could prepare a boot floppy with the commandline within the grub configuration on the floppy. Link to an image is on http://forgeftp.novell.com/yast/doc/SLES9/autoinstall/index.html Similar setup is possible with network cards that support pxe boot. In both cases you need a TFTP server to load the install kernel and initrd, but it saves you typing the nfsserver etc. lines each time. To avoid typing the IP of the machine to be installed, you also need DHCP in both cases. Björn -- Dr. Björn Lotz, Linux Curriculum Developer Novell Worldwide Training Services Novell GmbH, Frankfurter Ring 115a, 80807 München Tel: 089/206002000 Fax: 089/206002100
On Donnerstag 20 Oktober 2005 13:15, Bjoern Lotz wrote:
Hi,
Am Donnerstag, 20. Oktober 2005 12:55 schrieb Rainer Krienke:
On Donnerstag 20 Oktober 2005 12:40, Yan Fitterer wrote:
All you need is to autoinstall=nfs://x.x.x.x/installsource/autoinst.xml on your install kernel command line.
autoyast=default will not pick up a file called autoinst.xml
Thanks for the answer. But always typing the complete ip and nfs path for each installtion is again annoying and error prone. In this case it would be easier to manually select the software selection in yast which after all was what I wanted to avoid. Is there no way to have autoyast search the file on the installation media (NFS dir in my case)?
If your machines can boot from floppy you could prepare a boot floppy with the commandline within the grub configuration on the floppy. Link to an image is on
Well the trouble is rarely any new computer has a floppy built in today. But I tried with an older host and put my very simple configuration from my initial mail on the floppy and when starting the installation I said autoyast=floppy. autoyast came up and then accessed the floppy and then after a short while complained "Error configuring disk partitions" (translated back from german into english). The autoinst.xml file does not contain a line about partitions so why does autoyast try to do such a configuration? Any idea? The PXE solution is a possible way, but again it adds quite a lot of complexity to be invested in the setup of such a solution. The default way to search the autoinst.xml file by URLs like nfs:// or http:// or tftp:// is very flexible but leads to more typing (causing typos) or like just said much more complexity (PXE aware DHCP serverconfig, TFTP-server for PXE) just to avoid typing. I really ask myself why does autoyast not simply additionally search the installation media for such a rule file. After all autoyast must have access to the installation media in order to access the rpm packages for installation so why not simply read the file from a fixed place in there? This would really be the most flexible solution for network based installations I can imagine and it would be very very simple to set up? In the autoyast documentation I found another way. It says, that when booting from cdrom (but installing from the Network) the installer can be advised by the file:// URL to search the autoinst.xml file on the suse CD (I guess that file://autoinst.xml would describe the file autoinst.xml in the toplevel directory of the CD containing the suse directory?). So what I would have to do is to copy the first SuSE CD with a modified Eltorito boot-image where I add the additional autoyast=file://autoinst.xml directive into the grub configuration. Should this work or am I missing something? Thanks for your help Rainer -- --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Rainer Krienke, Universitaet Koblenz, Rechenzentrum, Raum A022 Universitaetsstrasse 1, 56070 Koblenz, Tel: +49 261287 -1312, Fax: -1001312 Mail: krienke@uni-koblenz.de, Web: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke Get my public PGP key: http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke/mypgp.html ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Well the trouble is rarely any new computer has a floppy built in today. But I tried with an older host and put my very simple configuration from my initial mail on the floppy and when starting the installation I said autoyast=floppy.
You could boot on a USB-stick too, make the stick bootable with syslinux and put the installer-kernel and initrd there too. Works fine here. You can even use the same stick for several linux versions/distributions, and have a rescue system on it too. It would be really nice if it was enough to supply the path to the xml-file and not the installation-area. The installation area could me a tag in the xml-file. (I think I read something about that in version 10?) / Daniel
On Thursday 20 October 2005 14:55, Rainer Krienke wrote:
In the autoyast documentation I found another way. It says, that when booting from cdrom (but installing from the Network) the installer can be advised by the file:// URL to search the autoinst.xml file on the suse CD (I guess that file://autoinst.xml would describe the file autoinst.xml in the toplevel directory of the CD containing the suse directory?). So what I would have to do is to copy the first SuSE CD with a modified Eltorito boot-image where I add the additional autoyast=file://autoinst.xml directive into the grub configuration. Should this work or am I missing something?
you can put the profile on the CD and autoyast will find it via file:///my.xml You can boot from CD and install via nfs and if you put the my.xml into the root of the installation source on the nfs server, autoyast=file:///my.xml should find the file too. And it's "file:///" not "file://" -- ciao, Uwe Gansert Uwe Gansert, Server Technologies Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstrasse 5, D-90409 Nuernberg, Germany e-mail: uwe.gansert@suse.de, Tel: +49-(0)911-74053-0, Fax: +49-(0)911-74053-476, Web: http://www.suse.de
participants (5)
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Bjoern Lotz -
Rainer Krienke -
suselist＠nlsn.nu -
Uwe Gansert -
Yan Fitterer