Since 9.2 was released, my foreman katello server is imaging hosts with 9.2. I’m still pointed at the 9.1 EL repository for my Installation Media and OS. I see the install.img is a different size in 9.1 vs 9.2 repos. Is this expected behaviour? I don’t think this is a foreman problem. If I’m being redirected to 9.2 is there an archive I can use to continue installing 9.1? It’s the version we started testing a month ago for our environment and I don’t want ot switch.
Thank you.
Hey!
Hm just to make sure, how are you bootstrapping your machines?
Because I just checked the CDN path of 9.1 and it’s still 9.1 there. (maybe you are able to share how you are syncing the repos and the important part of the Foreman config, like installation media)
I suspect the installation media URI is set to default, which is: https://download.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/$version/BaseOS/$arch/os if I see it correctly in my instance 
But don’t take my suspicions by word, not using the Foreman bootstrapping myself.
Thanks for the quick reply.
To save our bandwidth I created a mirrored repo from:
https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/9.1/BaseOS/x86_64/os
And the installation media points to the foreman URI.
It was working perfectly until recently and I see 9.2 dropped within the last week. The only other thing I can think of is something in the group install was upgrading the kernel, so I disabled all package installations on the kickstart and I still ended up with 9.2.
And this is the Installation Media
Huh… very interesting… the only thing that spikes to my mind is that the kickstart install actually doesn’t use the provided repo config (which is normally by default in the provisioning template in Foreman), but rather pulling the content from the mirrorlist/the CDN.
The synced repo and also the installation media would totally make sense how they are there.
One thing to check there is of course looking if the content in your synced repo is still the 9.1 one, but I’m sure you already did that, right?
Can you look into how the kickstart file provided to you installing hosts looks? I think to remember you can look at the rendered file afterwards (not the preview in the templates)
Sure. I’ll look at the anaconda logs. So it only installs the kernel for 9.2. There are no other kernels when I inspect the host after imaging, so nothing is upgrading it. It’s just using the image and kernel for 9.2 for some reason.
Is it the install.img which for 9.1 is around 690 MBs that is used to image a machine? I’m trying to see if there’s a way for me to verify what version it is from my 9.1 repo, and, also, if there’s a way to see in the anaconda logs what image was used. Very curious. I upgraded our server yesterday to foreman 3.5 and katello 4.7, from 3.4 and 4.6 because there was a hotfix I needed. probably just a coincidence of timing. I can’t think why the upgrade would mess up my Installation media etc.
This is actually what I expected, that it’s not using any content from the install.img, this should really be only the install environment as far as I know, the content always comes from remote (of course it is possible to install with a custom image which has a local repo, but I don’t remember this being the case for the Foreman based installs)
And this makes even more sense now, the install environment, the install.img is 9.1, but the content that gets pulled in (referenced in the kickstart) is from 9.2!
Oh I also know another option how to get the kickstart config that got used, normally it gets put as an anaconda-ks.cfg file in the /root directory, if you can’t find it in the Foreman task log, it should be there
(I’m pretty confident already that it’s pulling 9.2 from somewhere remote)
Well I’m pretty dejected. I’ve banged my head since yesterday and the OS and Installation media definitely are correct and it doesn’t matter if I reference my foreman mirror or go directly to rocky downloads 9.2 always installs. I also tried my recent 8.7 kickstart that I setup and now 8.8 installs which also just came out a week ago.
I’ve also used <%= @mediapath %> and also directly set the url with “url --url=”" in the kickstart and that makes no difference.
Did you already look in the anaconda-ks.cfg which repo ... entry it has in it? Could you share that, maybe I understand better then
Right, sorry for lingering.
Here are my mirrored repos that are definitely, 100% pointed to 9.1 repos at dl.rockylinux.org.
And to be on the conservative side I put Installation Media back to the online website rather than my mirrored repo.
Here’s how <%= @mediapath %> was expanded in the original-ks.cfg:
url --url Index of /vault/rocky/9.1/BaseOS/x86_64/os/
So ^^^ I assume this should be where the installation media is getting pulled from.
Okay thank you, hm very interesting if this was the only entry in the *-ks.cfg file, because it will definitely get it’s packages from there in this case 
(I guess the screenshot list is also from a kickstart install, but not from one of the mentioned once right? because if, you will have to check all the repos above if there are really no 9.2 packages in them, if it is 9.2 you will find packages with a 9_2 in the name)
Hmm one other thing which you could check is, what dnf list --installed tells you after the install because it should at least say @anaconda as the installation source, if I remember correctly, I know it won’t tell us from where it got installed but if it has installed the package after the bootstrap, if it’s something like @baseos or @appstream
I think I’m making progress, but it’s still installing 9.2.
So until the 9.2 version came out, I didn’t need Rocky 9 BaseOS repository. Only the 9.1 version. After that a bunch of packages failed to install during kickstart, so I’m assuming they got moved out of 9.1 into 9. I had to add the BaseOS Rocky 9 repo to my kickstart which allowed all the failed packages to install and image my host. The 9 repo has the kernels for version 9.2. I excluded all the kernels that get installed from the BaseOS rocky 9 repo and indeed the kernels from 9.1 installed. Yet, when I look at /etc/redhat-release I’m still seeing 9.2. I looked over the anaconda logs again and recursively grepped for 9.2 and there’s nothing. All the repos are 9.1 and 9 and it even says the linux image and boot image are 9.1.
Total head scratcher, but something got messed up when the 9.2 repositories got added. I’m going to try one more thing. I’ll completely remove the BaseOS Rocky 9 repo from my kickstart and any packages that are missing from 9.1 I’ll manually upload to my foreman mirror after downloading them from baseOS 9. If that doesn’t work, I’m going to put it on the backburner for a while as I’ve already wasted a lot of time on this.
