[svlug] Developing Kickstart scripts when they are used in production

[Richard Sharpe]

Hi,

At my current place of employ I set up kickstart to install Linux and our 
stuff on our appliances.

However, product managers want to change the hardware, and some changes 
require that changes be made to the Kickstart scripts. Eg, moving to two 
drives and wanting to mirror some stuff and so on.

To handle this sitution, I decided to set up a development kickstart area 
as well as the production kickstart area. This is a good start, but 
problems occur when we have to move a new kickstart file into production.

While it is possible to eliminate some of these by setting up a separate 
name space (via a separate DNS and isolated network) that is a pain. Life 
would be a whole lot easier, on the whole, if Kickstart allowed you to 
embed variables in a kickstart script.

I am already doing this in the %post script:

 	# Post installation fixup stuff
 	%post
 	printenv
 	KS=`printenv| grep ANACONDAARGS | cut -f3 -d/ | cut -f1 -d.`
 	echo Kickstart location is: $KS

which allows me to minimize the hand-edits that are needed when moving 
stuff from dev to production. This is handled by specifying that the 
kickstart config file is at http://ks... pr http://ks-dev... in the boot 
cd used ...

However, things like the url keyword still present problems:

 	url --url http://ks...

Here I have to remember to manually edit the script when I move it over.

Are there any simple solutions? Do I have to learn Python?

Regards
-------
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe[at]richardsharpe.com, rsharpe[at]samba.org,
sharpe[at]ethereal.com, http://www.richardsharpe.com