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Luke
Asked: 2012-10-24 11:05:22 +0800 CST

How to get CentOS 6 kickstart to ask for hostname?

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I'm using the CentOS 6 netinstall ISO with some kickstart files on an http server. When the ISO boots I hit TAB and enter the boot options asknetwork ks=http://<ip-address>/path/to/kickstart.ks.

My kickstart files do not have a network parameter, so it should be prompting. When I leave out asknetwork it tries to use DHCP. With asknetwork it only prompts for IP information.

Unfortunately anaconda is hell bent on automatically discovering the hostname, which ends up being a reverse DNS lookup of the IP, or localhost.localdomain if nothing was found.

Is there a way to make anaconda prompt for the hostname, or some way to pre-enter it through a custom boot option?

There used to be network --bootproto=query for CentOS 5, but this no longer works in 6.

centos

3 Answers

  1. I set the hostname in the kickstart file directly.

    If you're trying to reuse the same template, you could get creative and use a bit of PHP to pass something to the installer. Kickstart files are http, so you could do something like: 

    ks=http://repo.brazzers.com/ks/kickstart.php?hostname=kitty

    ...where kitty is a variable in the kickstart file that populates the --hostname= parameter

    Or the better route is to use a more robust provisioning framework like Cobbler.

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  2. I prefer this method using bash:

    %include /tmp/network.txt

%pre
#!/bin/sh
exec < /dev/tty3 > /dev/tty3 2>&1
chvt 3
hn=""

while [ "$hn" == "" ]; do
 clear
 echo " *** Please enter the following details: *** "
 echo
 read -p "Hostname: " hn
done
clear
chvt 1
echo "network --device eth0 --bootproto static --noipv6 --hostname ${hn}" > /tmp/network.txt
    • 1

  3. I was trying to do this with virt-install and found a blog article with an excellent solution to this. The solution uses the /proc/cmdlines passed to the kernel at boot time to extract a hostname using a pre kickstart section and write a temporary file that is then included in the main kickstart section.

    http://monzell.com/post/15547967527/automatically-set-the-hostname-during-kickstart

    The blog was for kickstarting VMs in KVM. But I don't see any reason this wouldn't work in any other kickstart scenario where you can pass the kernel boot arguments easily.

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