kickstart based installations not working with 11.10

[Ioannis Vranos]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 2:13 AM, Lonni J Friedman <netllama at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
> I run a large server farm (several hundred systems), where I need to
> frequently perform automated, kickstart based installations of
> assorted Linux distributions. I've been doing this with Ubuntu since
> the 7.xx days, and its usually mostly worked fine.
>
> However, since 11.10 came out, I cannot get any kickstart based
> installation to work at all. It appears that the layout & design of
> the installation ISO images has changed dramatically, such that they
> no longer include the standard pool/main/* packages, and have instead
> seemingly stuffed all of them into some squashfs file.
>
> The basic process that I've followed for all previous versions (up to
> & including 11.04) was to:
> 0) Download the OS DVD ISO
> 1) Extract its full contents, as-is, on a web server
> 2) Create a kickstart file and put it on the web server
> 3) Grab the netboot kernel & initrd from the extracted content, and
> boot the target system(s), with appropriate parameters. For example:
> vga=normal ramdisk_size=16384
> ks=http://10.31.40.58/distros/ubuntu/os/x86_64/11.04/ks.cfg
> root=/dev/rd/0 rw -
>
>
> With 11.10, step 3 fails miserably, reporting "There are no packages
> matching the running kernel 3.0.0-12-generic in the archive". Which is
> true, because the 11.10 ISO images ships with almost no packages at
> all, which happens to include the lack of a 'linux' kernel package.
>
> I've spent a chunk of time googling for an answer, but kickstart seems
> to be the red-headed step child feature in Ubuntu, and barely gets
> documented at all, even when it is working ok. Hopefully there's some
> relatively trivial solution for this?


Two manuals that may interest you.

Ubuntu 11.10 Server Guide:
https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/serverguide/C/serverguide.pdf [PDF]

Ubuntu 11.10 Installation Guide:
https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/installation-guide/i386/index.html


Perhaps this is what you are looking for?

https://help.ubuntu.com/11.10/installation-guide/i386/automatic-install.html




-- 
Ioannis Vranos

http://www.cpp-software.net