Not sure what Cobbler version you are talking about. I'll assume 2.6.10
and thus the corresponding release26 branch in git.
1) The .ks file I was able to get working is in the
/var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts directory, but I noticed that there is
another file in that directory that has a .cfg file extension. What is
that file for?
First, an introduction to make things clear:
This /var/lib/cobbler/kickstarts directory contains automated
installation files templates, copied from the "kickstarts" directory in
Cobbler git repository. Each template is not the final file used during
the installation; the template is rendered for each specific target
system, creating an automated installation file for it.
Several automated installation file formats are supported : kickstart,
autoyast and preseed files.
Kickstart files are used in Red Hat based distributions (eg RHEL,
Fedora, CentOS), autoyast are used in Suse based distributions (eg SLES,
OpenSuse) and preseed files are used in Debian based distributions (eg
Debian, Ubuntu).
There are 2 reasons for having more than one sample kickstart file
templates:
- Different Red-Hat based distributions may require small differences in
kickstarts.
- A kickstart may be used for a very specific scenario (eg PXE rescue)
Ideally, these differences could be coded using the template conditional
expressions and only one kickstart file could be kept in the
"kickstarts" directory, but it is easier to contribute a new kickstart
file than adding template code to the existing kickstarts and thus that
was the route followed by some past Cobbler contributors. That is the
case of the 2 .cfg files (esxi4-ks.cfg and esxi5-ks.cfg) you mentioned,
which are kickstart files for ESXi distribution (a Linux distribution
which runs in a VMware host). The .cfg extension should be .ks as the
other files, there is no reason to use .cfg afaik. Also, these 2 files
are currently empty, which makes them useless imho. They probably should
be deleted from the git repository and not be installed in the Cobbler
server.
2) In the .ks file, I saw a variable (I think it's a variable)
named
"$continueAnyway". It looks like that sets whether the kickstart file
should continue being processed. Is that a standard variable in
Cobbler? How do it get set?
I do not see that variable in the kickstart templates. Which version of
Cobbler you are using?
Regards,
Alan Evangelista