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Kickstarting Live Images

Grendel can be configured to kickstart compute nodes from live images. Building live images is out of the scope of this document and it's assumed you already have a live image built. In order to kickstart we need to have the appropriate installation media for the RHEL based distribution. In this example, we'll be using CentOS. If you already have a local CentOS mirror you can skip the next section. Otherwise you can use Grendel to serve the installation media over HTTP(S).

Serve the installation media

Grendel can be configured to serve installation media. These files are fetched by anaconda during the kickstart process. This includes the installation program runtime image to be loaded specified by the inst.stage2 kernel argument. Create a local copy of the CentOS media and add the following to grendel.toml:

[provision]
repo_dir = "/repo"

The above simply configures Grendel as a file server, serving any files in that directory over HTTP.

Note

repo_dir can be the top level directory which may contain multiple different local mirrors (for example centos, epel, etc). If so, you can specify the correct path in the kernel command line below.

After starting Grendel services you should see the output below indicating Grendel is now serving the repo_dir configured above:

INFO PROVISION: Using repo dir: /repo

Create the Boot Image JSON

Add the path to the live image and the kernel command line arguments for kickstarting. The example below uses Grendel to serve all the provision assets. Grendel will substitute $.endpoints.KickstartURL with the full URL to the kickstart file served by Grendel. $.endpoints.RepoURL will be the base url of the repo_dir defined above and served by Grendel. You don't have to use Grendel to serve the provision assets and can simply adjust the kernel command line arguments to the appropriate URLs for your situation.

[{
    "name": "centos7",
    "kernel": "/repo/centos/7.7.1908/os/x86_64/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz",
    "initrd": [
        "/repo/centos/7.7.1908/os/x86_64/images/pxeboot/initrd.img"
    ],
    "cmdline": "ks={{ $.endpoints.KickstartURL }} network ksdevice=bootif ks.device=bootif inst.stage2={{ $.endpoints.RepoURL }}/centos/7.7.1908/os/x86_64",
    "liveimg": "/images/compute-node.squashfs"
}]

With the above config Grendel will generate an iPXE script, for example:

#!ipxe
kernel --name kernel http://192.168.10.254/boot/file/kernel

initrd --name initrd0 http://192.168.10.254/boot/file/initrd-0
boot kernel initrd=initrd0 ks=http://192.168.10.254/boot/kickstart network ksdevice=bootif ks.device=bootif inst.stage2=http://192.168.10.254/repo/centos/7.7.1908/os/x86_64

Grendel also includes a basic kickstart template which uses a live image for the installation source, for example:

install
liveimg --url="http://192.168.10.254/boot/file/liveimg

lang en_US.UTF-8
selinux --disabled
keyboard us
timezone --utc America/New_York
skipx

network --bootproto dhcp --hostname tux01.local --device=de:ad:be:ef:12:8c