suse-9.3 initrd wonkyness

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Feb 10, 2006, Net Llama! wrote:
>On 02/10/2006 03:37 PM, Bill Campbell wrote:
>>On Fri, Feb 10, 2006, Net Llama! wrote:
>>>I've been fighting with this bizarro problem for the past 3 days, and I'm
>>>about at my wit's end, so hopefully one of you suse experts can help.
>>>
>>>I'm trying to create a suse auto-install CD that will use autoyast to
>>>install the packages from a separate box on the network.  I've got suse
>>>9.3-x86, 10.0-x86, and 10.0-x86_64 all working perfectly.
>>
>>Why do you need an autoinstall CD?
>
>Because we have a test farm at work where diffrent distributions are 
>automatically installed.  I need to install the distro without any human 
>intervention.  Redhat makes this easy as pie.  Suse makes brain surgery 
>look simple by comparison.

It doesn't require a special CD to do that.  I do it all the time using the
standard SuSE boot CD -- SLES9 (Suse Linux Enterprise 9) primarily.  Put in
the appropriate floppy with the info file, go away and forget it until the
install is complete.

Our installations set up several users and groups, set the root password to
an initial value, and leave the system ready to install our software using
the OpenPKG portable packaging system.

As for brain surgery -- I think not.  The autoyast configuration tool is
essentially the same as the normal Suse installation.  The hardest part for
me was to figure out how to build the installation floppy with the proper
modules.  My first cuts kept the autoinst XML file on the floppy so it was
a bit of a problem figuring out the proper device specification when using
USB floppy drives on machines with SATA hard drivers.  That ceased to be a
problem when we put the XML file on the NFS installation machine.

Our installation server has the SLES9 installation with all service packs
so the system is ready to go as soon as the installation is complete.

Bill
--
INTERNET:   bill at Celestial.COM  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
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