[CentOS] Kickstart ksdevice question

Paul Heinlein heinlein at madboa.com
Fri Nov 3 16:13:21 UTC 2017


On Fri, 3 Nov 2017, Mark Haney wrote:

> On 11/01/2017 05:02 PM, James A. Peltier wrote:
>>  Leaving ksdevice= off the command line will prompt you for the location of
>>  the kickstart file and the device you want to use to kickstart
>> 
> Well, things just got weird with this.  The first couple of times I included 
> the biosdevname etc, on the command line with ksdevice=eth0 it worked 
> perfectly.  Sometime yesterday (and I verified this a few minutes ago) that 
> stopped working.  It's the same hardware (in fact, the exact same hardware as 
> I tested earlier, as it's the same box) and now, it's naming the interfaces 
> eno1/eno2 again.
>
> Honestly, not that I care, since taking the ksdevice= bit off worked just 
> fine, even with the interface names changed to eth0/eth1 in the kickstart 
> file. I have no idea why this happened, and finding an answer isn't critical 
> to getting these boxes kicked, though I would like to understand why the 
> BIOSDEVNAME NET.IFRAMES options stopped working suddenly.  It's the same boot 
> image, and the exact same server that renamed the interfaces correctly 
> yesterday.  Granted, it's Friday and maybe anaconda is tired of my crap and 
> has decided to throw a tantrum.

I haven't been following this thread all that closely, so I'm unsure 
what system and firmware you have -- but we recently encountered a 
BIOS bug that has disrupted some local kickstarts.

The short version is that our Intel SMBIOS reports duplicate names for 
onboard ethernet devices, which in our case are I350 1G cards:

[root ~]# biosdevname -d | grep 'BIOS device'
BIOS device: em1
BIOS device: em1
BIOS device: p785p1

Ideally, the second device would be em2. Since they report the same, 
systemd gets inconsistently confused and the devices' "Kernel name" 
entries bounce between enoX and ethX.

Worse, if I log in via the console, disable the interfaces, use 
modprobe to remove the igb modules, and the re-load it -- the 
interfaces may end up with different designations than they had at 
boot time.

Intel has released a BIOS update that supposedly fixes the problem, 
but I haven't been able yet to travel to the data center to apply and 
test the patch. (No RMM modules in this rack, so I can't attach 
virtual boot media. Sigh.)

Anyway, that may not be your problem, but it might be worth looking 
into.

-- 
Paul Heinlein
heinlein at madboa.com
45°38' N, 122°6' W


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