kickstart based installations not working with 11.10

[Ioannis Vranos]

On Sat, Oct 22, 2011 at 8:59 PM, Ioannis Vranos
<ioannis.vranos at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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


Also the date of your email message is 4 days behind. Perhaps you need
to adjust the clock of your computer.



-- 
Ioannis Vranos

http://www.cpp-software.net