Create Kickstart Server on Fedora

Files

All files housed here

Intro

This Ansible playbook runs on CentOS. It will create a server which allows you to install Fedora automatically via PXE boot and Kickstart.

For more information on Fedora's Kickstart capabilities see this link

Useful Information

How to set up Fedora Kickstart

The Fedora Mirror I used

https://gist.github.com/andrewwippler/b636cdb68249ab5ffb67b4d8693a780b

Prerequisites

Note: If you use a VM it will need at least 90GB of space.

Install CentOS

You can download and install CentOS here

The installation services used by this program are very lightweight so you can install on just about anything. A 12GB hard drive, 2GB RAM, and a single processor are enough for what we are doing.

Go ahead and install CentOS on whatever you like, the only requirement is that it must be reachable at layer 2 by the Fedora hosts you want to install.

Install Ansible and git

Before continuing you will need to install Ansible on your host by running yum install -y ansible git.

Disable SELinux

Or set proper policies. Pick your poison. Since I only stood this thing up for as long as it took to kickstart I was lazy and just disabled it. Sue me.

setenforce 0

I also updated this in /etc/selniux/config.

Grab Image Files

You need to grab the image files for vmlinuz and initrd.img in order for Linux to boot properly. For Fedora grab them from the below.

wget https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/31/Server/x86_64/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz -O /var/lib/tftpboot/vmlinuz
wget https://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/fedora/linux/releases/31/Server/x86_64/os/images/pxeboot/initrd.img -O /var/lib/tftpboot/initrd.img
wget http://fedora.mirrors.pair.com/linux/releases/31/Server/x86_64/os/images/install.img -O /var/www/html/iso/images/install.img

Clone the Fedora Repositories

On a host of your choosing, run the following (update the 31 to the appropriate Fedora version):

rsync http://ftp.muug.mb.ca/pub/fedora/linux/releases/31/Everything/x86_64/os/Packages/ /var/www/html/iso/Packages

Note: You will probably have to create the above directory.

You'll need 73 GB free to sync the packages. You will also need to grab the file in the repodata directory called ending with comps.xml. You can see its exact name in repomd.xml.

Set it and forget it because it will be a bit while this all downloads. After you are downloading run:

createrepo -g <THE COMPS FILE YOU DOWNLOADED> /var/www/html/iso/Packages

Clone the Repo

I typically use opt for optional programs. You may install wherever you like, but in this guide I will use opt. Clone the repo with: git clone https://github.com/grantcurell/Fedora-autoinstall.git

Move into the Fedora-autoinstall directory with cd /opt/Fedora-autoinstall

Configure the Inventory File

Ansible is controlled by what is called an inventory file. This inventory file contains all the configuration settings which will be used by Ansible. In our case, we will need to populate this with the settings we wish Fedora to have after installation.

The inventory file is called inventory.yml

You will need to fill in the following values:

  • dns
  • dhcp_start
  • dhcp_end
  • gateway
  • netmask
  • domain
  • root_password
  • server_ip
  • iso_fedora_pth
  • iso_fedora_checksum

Finally you will also need to fill in the host information. These are the hosts on which you would like to install Fedora.

Boot Drives

Most of the values are self explanatory however, boot_drive and data_drives may be a bit confusing. These options allow you to tell Ansible where to install Fedora and on which disks to configure datastores. The official documentation on how Fedora names drives is here The disks are in the order in which Fedora detects them. To get the order you may have to manually install Fedora on a system. You can make an educated guess from the BIOS menu or if you have something like iDrac you can look at the order of the disks on the RAID controller (assuming you have one).

Running the Code

Once you are finished editing the inventory.yml file, cd to the root of the Fedora-autoinstall directory and run make. This will run the makefile in the directory. You can see what it is doing by examining the file called Makefile

CRITICAL: Change BIOS Settings

If you have NVMe drives and are trying to install Fedora, make sure you go into your BIOS and disable Intel Rapid Storage Technology. If you do not, the NVMe drive will not appear and Anaconda will report that there are no disks available.

(Optional) Make it so that all hosts receive dhcp

I intentionally left it set up so that only configured hosts would receive dhcpd to make sure no one nukes their network. That said, if you want to make it so that all hosts receive dhcp edit /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf remove the line deny unknown-clients and then add the line filename "uefi/BOOTX64.EFI"; in the subnet {} directive. You will have to repeat this if you run make again. After you are done, run systemctl restart dhcpd

Make the Repository Available to Your Clients

Add a file called local.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d/local.repo with the following contents:

[local]
name=Local
baseurl=http://192.168.1.121/iso/Packages
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0

Advanced

Importing Packages from Another System Minimally

Method 2 - Under Development

Say you want to create a new offline installer. What you'll have to do is go to a system that has all of the packages you might want to use in your new image. You will then want to scrape all those packages so that you can then use them on your new kickstart server. Do the following.

  1. On the system that already has the packages run: dnf list installed | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | tr '\r\n' ' ' | sed s/Installed//g.
  2. The above command gets a list of all packages on the system and outputs them space separated. You could pipe that into xargs, but I prefer to do this next part manually in case there are any packages that don't work. Copy the output of the above and paste it as an argument to dnf download --resolve <YOUR_STUFF>. That will download all the packages on the server and their dependencies.
  3. If any packages do not resolve you can run dnf list installed | cut -d ' ' -f 1 | tr '\r\n' ' ' | sed s/Installed//g | sed s/<PACKAGE_NAME_THAT_DIDNT_WORK>//g to omit it from the list.
  4. After you run make on the Kickstart server to run the above command, go to /var/www/html/iso/packages/ and copy all of the packages to that directory. You can use something like scp * root@192.168.1.121:/var/www/html/iso/packages/ to do this.
  5. When you are done, browse to your server using Chrome or something and make sure all the packages are available. Ex: http://192.168.1.121/iso/packages/

Info on the Kickstart Process

Kickstart has a lot of black magic going on. So below I give a high level overview of what's happening.

  1. Server boots and you tell it to boot with PXE.

  2. PXE will then send out a DHCP request. The DHCP server that responds should be your kickstart server (typically) and it will have a few extra options set. Namely there should be a line that looks like the following:

    # This line tell sth server to reach out over TFTP and grab the uefi/BOOTX64.EFI file. This file is a binary
# file which tells the server how to boot. It will be specific to your distro and you should generally get
# it from the ISO which you want to install. The path is a relative path against the TFTP root directory.
filename "uefi/BOOTX64.EFI";

  3. Next, if you are doing UEFI, the server will search for a series of file names in the TFTP server's UEFI directory until it finds a boot menu profile that matches. I couldn't find documentation on it, but if you watch /var/log/messages you can actually see it try different as show below. It progresses through listed host MAC addresses first, then the IP address in hex format, and at the very end tries the default grub.cfg. To get maximum output you can add server_args = -s /var/lib/tftpboot --verbose to /etc/xinetd.d/tftp assuming you are using xinetd to get this output.

    Jan 21 15:45:00 controller xinetd[10044]: START: tftp pid=10048 from=172.16.71.98
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10049]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename uefi/BOOTX64.EFI
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10049]: Error code 8: User aborted the transfer
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10050]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename uefi/BOOTX64.EFI
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10050]: Client 172.16.71.98 finished uefi/BOOTX64.EFI
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10051]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename uefi/grubx64.efi
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10051]: Client 172.16.71.98 finished uefi/grubx64.efi
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10052]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg-01-00-50-56-86-d4-06
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10052]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /uefi/grub.cfg-01-00-50-56-86-d4-06
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10053]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg-AC104762
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10053]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /uefi/grub.cfg-AC104762
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10054]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg-AC10476
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10054]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /uefi/grub.cfg-AC10476
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10055]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg-AC1047
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10055]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /uefi/grub.cfg-AC1047
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10056]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg-AC104
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10056]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /uefi/grub.cfg-AC104
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10057]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg-AC10
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10057]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /uefi/grub.cfg-AC10
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10058]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg-AC1
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10058]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /uefi/grub.cfg-AC1
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10059]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg-AC
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10059]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /uefi/grub.cfg-AC
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10060]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg-A
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10060]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /uefi/grub.cfg-A
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10061]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10061]: Client 172.16.71.98 finished /uefi/grub.cfg
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10062]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /EFI/BOOT/x86_64-efi/command.lst
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10062]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /EFI/BOOT/x86_64-efi/command.lst
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10063]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /EFI/BOOT/x86_64-efi/fs.lst
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10063]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /EFI/BOOT/x86_64-efi/fs.lst
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10064]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /EFI/BOOT/x86_64-efi/crypto.lst
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10064]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /EFI/BOOT/x86_64-efi/crypto.lst
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10065]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /EFI/BOOT/x86_64-efi/terminal.lst
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10065]: Client 172.16.71.98 File not found /EFI/BOOT/x86_64-efi/terminal.lst
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10066]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /uefi/grub.cfg
Jan 21 15:45:00 controller in.tftpd[10066]: Client 172.16.71.98 finished /uefi/grub.cfg
Jan 21 15:45:02 controller in.tftpd[10067]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /vmlinuz
Jan 21 15:45:03 controller in.tftpd[10067]: Client 172.16.71.98 finished /vmlinuz
Jan 21 15:45:03 controller in.tftpd[10068]: RRQ from 172.16.71.98 filename /initrd.img
Jan 21 15:45:08 controller in.tftpd[10068]: Client 172.16.71.98 finished /initrd.img

  4. The boot menu profile (grub.cfg) looks like the below. The most important line is the linuxefi line. This line points to where your installation media should be hosted. Typically using httpd.

    set default="1"

function load_video {
insmod efi_gop
insmod efi_uga
insmod video_bochs
insmod video_cirrus
insmod all_video
}

load_video
set gfxpayload=keep
insmod gzio
insmod part_gpt
insmod ext2

set timeout=1
### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ###

### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ###
menuentry 'Install Super Legit Fedora' --class fedora --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os {
        echo "Loading vmlinuz"
        linuxefi vmlinuz inst.ks=http://192.168.2.101/ks/uefi/fedora.cfg inst.repo=http://192.168.1.121/iso/

        echo "Loading initrd.img"
        initrdefi initrd.img
}

  5. The host in question will reach out and in this configuration grab a file called install.img located at /var/www/html/iso/images/ in this build. This file allows the host to boot and perform its other functions.

TODO - finish this.