I've finally got my auto-setup environment mostly working. The hosts will boot via PXE and they get their IP addresses from DHCP without issue and proceed to the Anaconda boot portion.

However, once Anaconda boots and attempts to get the same IP via the same DHCP server, it fails. I also don't see any requests in the boot.log on the DHCP server after the initial PXE requests, so it's like it's not even making the requests.

Anyone have any clue why Anaconda can't get an IP? Or perhaps a way to tell Anaconda what the IP is that it already has via the PXE boot?

What does your 'network' line look like in the kickstart ?

Do you use kickstart with PXE and which distro u r using to install via PXE ?

After doing some extensive research, I determined that the DHCP call from within Anaconda was resetting the interface on the switch itself, which required a minimum of 30 seconds to come back up.

Adding the following to the "append" section of the PXE boot file added a delay which allows the interface to fully reset and the DHCP requests to get through:

The first sets a 3 minute timeout on DHCP, and the later set a 50 second delay on bringing the interface up.

Those settings aren't always needed, it depends on how your switches are configured or set up.

After I added that, DHCP started working correctly.

Sounds like a delay due to spanning tree, if it's a cisco switch try modifying the interface config with:

'switchport mode access'