Kickstart failing

I’m testing out pxeboot and kickstart and ran into a problem this morning. So far I have a test system that will pxeboot using a ISC Kea server. The kickstart is read from nfs and the install proceeds. Somewhere before the %post section of the kickstart I see “unknown error has occured”. Looking at the 'More info…" doesn’t help much cause there’s a whole lot in there and I haven’t found any specific error.

The last thing I see in the install is “Configuring installed system”. Once it errors out I can see that none of the %post section has run. And there isn’t a postinstall.log even though it was defined in the %post part of the kickstart. The shadow file has no password set, but it was defined.

I can tell that the %pre section is running and saving output to /root/preinstall.log

I’m a bit hesitant to upload all the files in /tmp on the system being installed, not sure what should be sanitized out of those files to be safe. Any advice one where I should be looking for the error?

I have gotten the system to boot and have a copy of everything that was in /tmp from the most recent attempt.

Any suggestions on what to look for in those files?

After quite a few test installs I’ve narrowed it down to the services command.

The install fails with this command in kickstart:

services --disabled=libvirtd,ntpd --enabled=sssd,nfs-server,nfs-lock,autofs,sendmail,nscd,chronyd,snmpd

I’ve ended up just removing that command from the kickstart. I can deal with services after the system comes back up.

If anyone has a solution for fixing the command I’d appreciate the info.

Have you tried putting each service on only one line to see if there is an issue with one or more of them?

services --disabled=libvirtd
services --enabled=sssd
etc

I usually configure my services in the post section using the systemctl commands like this:

%post --log=/root/services.log
systemctl mask --now avahi-daemon.service
systemctl enable rsyslog.service
%end

1 Like

@BiloxiGeek, @carlisle has given a good suggestion, break down the syntax for what services to enable and disable on an individual line basis.

Also, insert echo statements in between individual “sections” of code to locate the problematic section. Finally have as much as you can captured to a designated logfile for the %post section and also sent to the screen for real-time evaluation.

Good luck Sergeant,
Warron