Does AlmaLinux work with kickstart?

Support
1

HI All,

I am new to AlmaLinux. I was trying to migrate our installation machinery from CentOS 7 to Alma Linux 8.6, but failed. The kickstart fails with "dracut-initqueue no suitable images ".

I was trying both local copy of unpacked AlmaLinux DVD, or Index of /almalinux/8/AppStream/x86_64/kickstart/ as the url in kickstart.

How is it supposed to work? Why there are two repos, one ./os and one ./kickstart, how are they different ? Is there any documentation on how to setup kickstart with AlmaLinux? Any advice greatly appreciated, thanks!

2

I have used kickstart for both Alma 8 and 9. (Not complete automation yet; I leave some details to be set interactively.) Booted with PXE, actually.

Up to CentOS 7 (point) release set of packages was in “base” repo and interim updates did drop into “updates” repo. You could repeat installation at any time (before next point release) and get exact same package versions (from base). On the other hand, if you did want to get updates ASAP, you had to add the updates repo into the installation (interactive or kickstart).

When Alma 8 and 9 do a (point) release, two identical trees are created: “os” and “kickstart”.
The “kickstart” is not modified after creation. The interim updates are dropped into the “os”.

Therefore, if you do use the “kickstart” branches, then you do get the initial 8.6 content.
If you do use the “os”, then you get latest available versions of packages.

I usually run at least one interactive install. It does write a kickstart file into /root/.
Then I can run (kickstart) install with that file (although I tend to tune it further).

3

Thanks for the reply!

We develop kickstart manually, the kickstarts we have grown sort of involved over time, and we never do any interactive installs. Everything we do should be pxebootable and reinstallable remotely.

So, am I understanding correctly, that this should simply work?

install
###cmdline
#text
url --url=Index of /almalinux/8/BaseOS/x86_64/kickstart/

4

Actually, looks like it tries to get install.img and squashfs.img and failing?
Why cannot simply use the base repo?

Any way to tell Alma installer to use the Base repo as in olden CentOS7 days ?

5

Lack of ANY kickstart documentation on almalinux Wiki is frustrating. Come on, folks, there are people that still are using Baremetal and not your useful cloud images. In fact, kickstart is about the only reason to stay with any RedHat derivative that there is…

6

I’ve used Kickstart with AlmaLinux 9. Part of a kickstart file for a server which installs using AlmaLinux repos as a source looks like this

# use text mode
text

# disable firstboot 
firstboot --disable

# set installation source
url --url="https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/9/BaseOS/x86_64/kickstart/"
repo --name="alamalinux9-baseos" --baseurl="https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/9/BaseOS/x86_64/os/" --mirrorlist=""
repo --name="alamalinux9-appstream" --baseurl="https://repo.almalinux.org/almalinux/9/AppStream/x86_64/os/" --mirrorlist=""
repo --name="epel9-everything" --baseurl="" --mirrorlist="https://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/mirrorlist?repo=epel-9&arch=x86_64"

I’ve tried changing the 9 in the URLs to 8 and looks like they then point at the equivalent things for AlmaLinux 8.

1 Like
7

We are indeed using Kickstart here. However, I have set up our own local repos. I have encountered some issues in my path but I managed to solve them following CentOS/RHEL solutions.

I have ISO and also PXE boot options to deploy the servers, both are working.

Are you injecting the proper initrd.img and vmlinuz files for the version you want to install?

8

I suggest perform a install from ISO, set everything up as you want with partitons, language and so on and go for minimal install (or whatever you want to kickstart later).
After install is complete, use the /root/anaconda-ks.cfg as your first kickstart template and make sure you can get that one working. After this works, start to modify it according to your needs.