Knowledge Base

The story

I have been learning how to automate my centos installations in my virtual environment. I've learned how to use the virsh command line to spin up a new vm the way I like, and to feed it a kickstart file. I also learned how to use kickstarts.

Set hostname automatically with a kickstart

In the main area of the kickstart file, include this line:

%include /tmp/network.ks

Include in your %pre section this section:

%pre
echo "network  --bootproto=dhcp --device=eth0 --ipv6=auto --activate --hostname renameme.ipa.example.com" > /tmp/network.ks
for x in $( cat /proc/cmdline );
do
   case $x in SERVERNAME*)
      eval $x
      echo "network  --bootproto=dhcp --device=eth0 --ipv6=auto --activate --hostname ${SERVERNAME}.ipa.example.com" > /tmp/network.ks
      ;;
   esac
done
%end

To paraphrase the post I'm duplicating for myself, you need the first echo redirection to the file in case there was no SERVERNAME= parameter given to the kernel. When you boot, you need to include on the kernel command (usually the "linux" one), the value SERVERNAME=myhostname. For my virsh command, that is:

vm=centos7-02a ; virt-install -n "${vm}" --memory 2048 --vcpus=1 --os-variant=rhel7.2 --accelerate -v --disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/"${vm}".qcow2,size=20 -l /mnt/public/Support/SetupsBig/CentOS-7-x86_64-Minimal-1511.iso  --initrd-inject=/mnt/public/Public/centos7-ks.cfg --extra-args "ks=file:/centos7-ks.cfg SERVERNAME=${vm}" --debug --network type=direct,source=eno1

References

1. Install system-config-kickstart on Fedora 25 http://bytefreaks.net/gnulinux/fedora-25-workaround-to-install-system-config-kickstart

   sudo dnf install
   

   https://kojipkgs.fedoraproject.org/packages/system-config-date/1.10.9/3.fc25/noarch/system-config-date-1.10.9-3.fc25.noarch.rpm python-kickstart system-config-kickstart;

2. https://sysadmin.compxtreme.ro/automatically-set-the-hostname-during-kickstart-installation/