I'm using a bootable ISO and several kickstart files on a web server to configure new systems. We don't have a DHCP server (and that isn't going to change), so I've had to hard-code an IP address on the bootable ISO to connect to the network. I want to change the address of the system being configured as soon as possible, so I used %pre to write a small script that will use ping to find an unused address in a given range and assign that address. Problem is, it looks like anaconda really doesn't like that. I'm not sure if it just gets unhappy about the address changing (the system times out on trying to get includes), or if the fact that I do not have a "network" config in the main body screws things up. What's really odd is I can ssh into the system with the "new" address, and I can ping, resolve names, wget, etc.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to pass an IP from %pre to a "network" config command. I know I can get text files passed from %pre to %post, but that won't help me here. One of the issues I have with changing the IP address in %post is it just doesn't happen cleanly... it doesn't look like the chrooted environment likes having the address messed with, either.

I did not understand exact your problem, but you can pass anything from %pre scripts using %include directive. A good place for temporary files is /tmp/ .