I am trying to create a custom installation of Rocky Linux using kickstart. The two goals of this are
To more quickly deploy it on a large number of systems (unattend)
To be able to include custom settings and packages in the installer, such as networking and domain join
However, I keep running into issues, the latest of which I haven’t managed to solve yet.
To make it short, I manage to boot off the ISO I generated that contains a custom kickstart.cfg as well as modified grub.cfg, and get into the graphical installer. The installer successfully skips the language and keyboard selection steps, which tells me that fundamentally the kickstart file works.
The installer then shows the installation summary, and unfortunately this is where things don`t work anymore. Under the section “Installation Source” I get the error message “Error setting up base repository”.
Now I know for a fact that the Image does in fact contain the repository, because when I boot the same image without using the custom kickstart.cfg, everything works just fine without the error message.
My best guess is that something in the kickstart.cfg is not working with the way that the installation medium is mounted during the installation and is therefore not finding the repositories in the path it expects them to be.
This is my kickstart cfg: (It is based off of a clean manual installation of Rocky Linux on the same hardware)
Generated by Anaconda 34.25.5.17
Generated by pykickstart v3.32
#version=RHEL9
Use graphical install
graphical
repo --name=“AppStream” --baseurl=file:///run/install/sources/mount-0000-hdd-device/AppStream
%addon com_redhat_kdump --enable --reserve-mb=‘auto’
%end
Keyboard layouts
keyboard --xlayouts=‘us’
System language
lang en_US.UTF-8
Use hard drive installation media
harddrive --dir= --partition=/dev/sda2
%packages
@^workstation-product-environment
%end
Run the Setup Agent on first boot
firstboot --enable
Generated using Blivet version 3.6.0
ignoredisk --only-use=sdb
autopart
Partition clearing information
clearpart --none --initlabel
System timezone
timezone Europe/Berlin
Root password
---redacted---
It doesn’t have to be BaseOS necessarily (it’s arbitrary), but kickstart for whatever reason does require a url line. You can have multiple repo lines of course, but I don’t think your installation will work without a BaseOS defined somewhere.
I will check it out and see if a change there improves things. It’s just a little odd since this file is exactly what the anaconda installer supposedly used for the first time installation of the system.
@0x0 : The DVD iso contains basically a full copy of the BaseOS and AppStream repositories, allowing you to access them directly from your local media (aka file:///run/install/sources/mount-0000-hdd-device/BaseOS ).
The BOOT iso contains no repositories, and requires some kind of network access to pull packages for the installation. So you’d have to point to somewhere on the network where the repositories are available. Either a local mirror or just use a public URL: https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/9/BaseOS/x86_64/os/
The network option works for kickstarting from DVD as well, no reason why you are required to use the local repos present on the media.
In my past experience in a corporate environment, most folks will use the boot iso and get all packages over the network. Often from a local cloned mirror that the organization controls.
