[CentOS] interactive %pre in kickstart?

[Will McDonald]

On 21/03/07, Florin Andrei <florin at andrei.myip.org> wrote:
> Here's what I'm currently doing in ks.cfg:
>
> %pre
> #!/bin/sh
> echo -n "Please enter blah: "
> read blah
> echo $blah > /tmp/ks-blah
>
> I know that "read blah" works fine, because after that I see the
> variable in the /tmp file.
>
> The problem is, echo doesn't seem to work at this stage. This pretty
> much kills the idea of an interactive %pre script.
> I was thinking to collect in %pre the information that is different from
> one system to another (and cannot be deduced automatically by
> kickstart), then the user can walk away and the system is installed and
> configured completely by kickstart.
>
> If %pre cannot be made interactive, then I'll have to move the
> customization after reboot, which is less than ideal.
>
> P.S.: I guess I could automatically generate a whole lot of ks.cfg files
>   on the kickstart server, and just tell the user to point the installer
> to the appropriate ks.cfg, instead of entering some info manually at the
> %pre stage.
> But somehow generating hundreds of ks.cfg files seems very ugly. I'd
> rather keep that algorithm in one single ks.cfg and let the user enter a
> couple things in the %pre stage.

If you know the MAC address of the system before install then you
could customise the install on that basis.

i.e. I know the MAC[s] of this box so when they're detected use
ks-mail.cfg or ks-web.cfg as appropriate, then have a front end to add
MACs use specific kickstart configs?

Will.