Frustrations with RHEL Kickstart, how to really get a good grasp on this
 

At times, it seems like a black box. Shouldn't be this hard. I often feel the official Red Hat documentation is very lacking with solid examples on how to implement correctly (See my post on .discinfo and .treeinfo question, at this point, I'm copying over the files that came with a RHEL 7.4 iso to use with my custom iso).

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...so-4175690127/


Can anyone offer pointers or advise on how to learn the syntax for Kickstart.

My end goal is to have a Kickstart file on an SSD drive and have it boot the RHEL installation.

From what I understand, Kickstart doesn't actually "boot" anything, it just automates an installation of RHEL, Fedora, and other distributions in the Red Hat family. From this, it seems you can perform a normal install of RHEL, etc and the installer automatically creates a kickstart file. Therefore theoretically you could just install RHEL, Fedora, or whatever other RHEL family OS and grab the kickstart file generated from the installer. If you configure it how you would like your kickstart file configured when you install it normally, you'll already have the configuration you want and therefore can just copy the kickstart file straight over to wherever you need it without having to edit it later on.

If I were going to learn how to do a kickstart file, I'd look at the syntax in the kickstart file generated by the installer. From the examples I've seen, it looks fairly straightforward. There is an example at the Wikipedia page for Kickstart here.

There are also some tools you can use to help configure a kickstart file too.

Currently I have two sled drives, /dev/sda and /dev/sdb. I'm creating the Kickstart file on /dev/sdb and the end goal is to take the drive sled which holds /dev/sdb and take it to either a workstation or server and install RHEL from there.

I'm going to leave the /dev/sdb only in the workstation and boot from a live disk and look at how the live disk views the drives from say lsblk and try to modify the Kickstart file from there, but so far, I haven't had any success.

I'm currently using a smaller drive, 512 GB, but eventually want to get this working on a drive that is close to 2 TB in size, so this will probably impact the mkisofs commands that I'm using to create the iso.

I'm not sure a kickstart file would work with YaST, since openSUSE/SUSE Linux use YaST as both it's installer and it's configuration center - I'd think you'd need to look into "autoyast" for SUSE's equivalent to RHEL's Kickstart.

Not sure why to look at SuSE's autoyast. I'm already looking at documentation from RHEL, CentOS and Fedora to piece all of the pieces of the puzzle together. Don't need to go down another rabbit hole.

My point was that as far as I know, a RHEL kickstart file will not work with YaST. Therefore if you're only interested in RHEL (and/or other members of the Red Hat family of OS's), then you obviously don't need to worry about autoyast, or indeed YaST at all.

Like I said before, the easiest way to find out what syntax you need is to have a look at an existing kickstart file. Again, that's how I would approach it, but please yourself, whatever, do what you want.