Hi,
In a corporate environment we are not allowed to use DHCP/PXE for doing network installations. This means we have to look for other solutions. Our solution is to use an ISO image (mounted via a KVM solution) to kick off the network installation.
A big problem currently is that the order of the network interfaces is arbitrary (depends on the order of the drivers loaded) and is not influence by the order of the PCI slots. So in our case we have a bunch of e1000, bnx2 and tg3 in systems we have to install.
The first onboard interface (usually tg3 or bnx2) almost never is eth0, but instead can be eth2, eth3 or higher. (Depending on the number of "other" NICs) This is problematic because Anaconda never gives a very good analysis of why the download of the kickstart fails. Very unpleasant if you want system deployements done by Service Operations.
So our solution was to provide ksdevice=MAC-ADDRESS , which works fine in the first phase for downloading the kickstart file, but then the kickstart file again has a network-directive with a --device= parameter to configure the network again in the second phase.
Here is where the trouble starts.
The --device= cannot handle MAC addresses, in other words if we ommit the --device= parameter we get a list of interfaces, which we do not want because the list does not indicate which one is the right interface.
Using ksdevice=bootif and providing BOOTIF=MAC-ADDRESS on the commandline does not help either because the second phase always wants to reconfigure the network.
In fact we don't want the second phase to reconfigure the network, we want it to keep the working network configuration from the first phase which worked fine for downloading the kickstart file.
So here's my question:
Is there a way to have the second phase network configuration NOT take place, or have it use the interface that was correctly downloading the kickstart file ?
I could not find it anywhere and none of my tests seem to indicate that this is at all possible.
This is on RHEL/CentOS 4.6.