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Kickstarting systems entail a ton of client-side, boot media, network-related, and server-related issues. It can be a real bear to track clown kickstart provisioning issues even for experienced administrators, much less the newly initiated! Here are a few of the most common problems users face with kickstart, and some tips for resolving them.
How do I make a bootable floppy or bootable CD from the bootdisk.img or boot.iso file, respectively? If you have downloaded the bootdisk.img and other files, follow the procedures here to create a bootable disk.
To create a bootable floppy disk from Linux:
insert a blank floppy
type the following command:
# dd if=bootdisk.img of=/dev/fd0
To create a bootable floppy disk from Windows:
type the following line to get the rawrite command from the install CD 1 (where D: is your CD-ROM drive):
C:\temp\> copy D:\dosutils\raw*.*
Insert a blank/formatted floppy and run the following command with your disk image file:
C:\temp\> rawrite -f bootdisk.img
Reboot
If it does not boot off the floppy, verify that your BIOS is set up to boot from the floppy first and hard drive second, and then reboot.
To create a bootable CD from Linux with a blank CD-R in your burner, as root type
# cdrecord dev= 0 ,0 /root/boot.iso
See the man page for cdrecord and use cdrecord -scanbus to see your CDR/W drive id number (the first zero in the preceding code).
To create a bootable CD from Windows use your favorite burning software to burn the boot.iso file (type ISO-9660) to a blank CDR
The system locks up when some people try to connect to the FTP shares on the kickstart .server. This can be caused by firewalls, or especially iptables, interfering with the underlying FTP, HTTP, or NFS-based protocols. Try getting around this problem by using an HTTP/web file share instead of an FTP share, or just by quickly shutting off iptables on the client, and then the server (if this is feasible). If the problem clears up, then this was the cause. If you're running FTP and want to try using HTTP quickly instead, just put your CD install files (the Fedora or Red Hat directories from your CDs) into a web directory like /var/www/html/kick-data and reconfigure your ks.cfg file's url -url line accordingly:
. install url --url http://example.com/kick-data/ lang en_US.UTF-8 . .
Put the ks.cfg file back on the floppy or on your network share and try it again.
My kickstart gets to the same place every time and then just stops. It never starts actually installing files. The problem could be a number of variables, from a typo in your ks.cfg file to problems with the network, DNS, your server, or firewalls. One great troubleshooting method is to use the virtual terminals to switch over and see what's going on. Remember to use (CTRL+)ALT+F2 to get to a bash prompt to poke around the system while it's being installed, ALT+F3 to view the actual install log, ALT+F4 to see all kernel messaging as it's happening (good to identify many errors), and ALT+F5 to see any partitioning and formatting information in real time. ALT+F7 will take you back to the GUI install screen (if GUI install mode is being used). If you are not able to change even virtual terminals, then you're not all the way through the network boot stage and you probably have a typo on your kickstart config file that is preventing it from coming all the way up (look specifically at your url -url and network lines).
My kickstart always dumps me out of the automated install and makes me enter the keyboard type, network settings, and media install source (CDROM, FTP, NFS, and so on)-just as if I were doing a completely manual install. This is a clear indicator that you have a problem either in the syslinux.cfg/isolinux.cfg file not pointing to your ks.cfg file correctly (either locally or over the network), or there is a typo in your ks.cfg file. Check them all and follow the flow of pointers.
My kickstart floppy install just keeps asking me for driver disks, never loads my network card driver, and never allows me to even get a DHCP address to get on the network! This is usually associated with unsupported hardware or hardware that is having problems being autodetected by the syslinux bootstrap environment. The problem is sometimes as simple as reseating your network card, or setting the machine's BIOS to reissue all of the PCI bus IRQs. Sometimes it will start working by simply moving a PCI NIC (and telling the BIOS to shuffle IRQs), because a PCI shared IRQ bug with your PCI/motherboard chipset and your cards. This latter problem seems to crop up more in systems with mass storage cards such as SCSI or RAID cards, but you might see this also with other types of cards such as sound cards, which have several IRQs. Try the hardware IRQ tricks first. If this does not clear things up, also try the boot: prompt kernel modifier variations of acpi=on, pci=biosirq , and pci=noacpi. If nothing works there, then it's time to hit Google, or visit http://bugzilla.redhat.com/.
My kickstart starts off just fine, and then half way through the install I get an error message saying something about unresolved dependencies. This is usually because you manually added RPM packages to the %packages section of your ks.cfg file. If you're not sure to also install any packages that that package may need, then you can get this error. The proper thing to do is to check out the dependencies a given package has before adding it to your kickstart (check this via rpm -q -requires <packagename>). That being said, the quick fix is to add the ks.cfg option %packages -resolvedeps to the packages line, which will hunt through the XML and RPM dependency lists to discover everything you need to install a given package, get those packages and install them first, as well as any of their sub-dependencies! A very nice change from the old days of manually tracking this stuff down.
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