kickstart with bonded interface
 

Does anyone have any suggestions as far as how to write a kickstart file that will create a bonded interface? The sample kickstart files that I have all include a static IP address, i.e.

network --device eth0 --bootproto static --ip 10.10.10.10

I haven't been able to find anything that shows how to write a kickstart file that will create a bond0 interface from eth0 and eth1.

I don't think it's supported. Why would you want to bond during the kickstart? It's not technically going to speed up the connection if you know how bond works on Ethernet devices in Linux.

I mean, if you're really worried one NIC will fail during the installation, then you might want to buy better hardware.

A typical kickstart installation for me only takes like 10-20 minutes, depending on what I install and postscripts.

I want the kickstart script to create the bonded interface, so that the newly built server will have a bonded interface when it is running. My understanding is that I should be able to completely configure the new server via the kickstart script, except I don't know how to write the kickstart script to do this.

Try the post script
 

This would need to be done in a post script that anaconda calls after the system has been installed and before the reboot is forced to boot the new system. You would need to cat the bonding module configuration info into either /etc/modules.conf or /etc/modprobe.conf depending on the version of RedHat/CentOS you are installing. Then an /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-bond0 file will need to be created with your desired info. This will be more tricky as you need to set an IP in here that is unique. Then you need to have the script change or over write /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0 and ifcfg-eth1 so that they point to the bond interface as the master.

All in all it has been easier for us to just manually create each bond on our servers than to try and program this out in a script.

Charlie

I think you'd want to achieve this with some post install scripts as nothing I've found supports creating bonded ethernet during the actual kickstart.

thanks, that makes sense. I was thinking that I needed to set up the network stuff before getting to the post install scripts.

Well, you can, it just doesn't support configuring bonded interfaces during the kickstart unless you run scripts in the post scripts.

You're probably better off just using DHCP to kickstart and let your post scripts do the bonding magic.