Oracle VM for X86 / RHEL PVM Kickstart Installation without DHCP

Just a quick and short post to share a tip related to installation of RHEL as ParaVirtual Machine using kickstart(or any distribution that can use kickstart) on Oracle VM 3 for X86 without having to rely on a DHCP for the Network Parameters. The only prerequisite that is needed is to have kickstart file and RHEL Installation Path available on the network and reachable from Oracle VM Manager Server.

Once that's done, we create our Virtual Server as usual, except that for Network Path, we're having to add more parameters. Indeed we can use the --args to add any parameters we're willing to pass to the kernel. So, we're having something like :

--args kernel_boot_paramaters http://install_server/rhel6_4

For example, let's say that my kickstart file is located on an http server and accessible via http://install_server/my_kickstart.ks, I also need to set 192.169.0.10 as IP of eth1 interface in order to get access to this kickstart file's URL and the RHEL installation tree is http://install_server/rhel6_4. Then, i'll have the following:

--args "ks=http://install_server/my_kickstart.ks ip=192.169.0.10 ksdevice=eth1 netmask=255.255.255.0 gateway=192.169.0.1" http://install_server/rhel6_4

Note that the --args section are in quote, this is needed to clearly draw the boundary between what is kernel arguments and the installation tree's URL. 

Ansible Hosts / Install alternate upgraded Python version

Following the highlighted error below which happened while trying to configure a RHEL4 node to be manageable by ansible (and that i rightly attributed to the old Python 2.3.4 which is the default version of Python for RHEL4), i've decided to install an alternate Python version on the same RHEL node without impacting the already existing environment. Below i'm sharing the 8 steps I followed to have that working.

Note that although i'm describing this Python Installation in  relation with Ansible Integration, Step 1 to Step 6 can be used for the installation of an alternate Python Environment on any other Linux Systems.

Ansible's Error:

[stivesso@ansible-server ~]$ ansible my_ansible_node -m ping  --ask-pass

SSH password:

my_ansible_node | FAILED >> {

    "failed": true,

    "msg": "\r\nSUDO-SUCCESS-josewbugtgyoijxrgkuxihoejbjsbiuq\r\n  File \"/home/esso_s/.ansible/tmp/ansible-tmp-1406122775.05-117998270117858/ping\", line 1177\r\n    clean_args = \" \".join(pipes.quote(arg) for arg in args)\r\n

     ^\r\nSyntaxError: invalid syntax\r\n", 

    "parsed": false

}

1. Install Prerequisites on the target host

# yum groupinstall "Development tools" # yum install zlib-devel bzip2-devel openssl-devel ncurses-devel sqlite-devel readline-devel tk-devel

2. Get an updated python package

# wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.7.5/Python-2.7.5.tgz --no-check-certificate

3. Untar/unzip the package on the target node

# tar zxvf Python-2.7.5.tgz

4. configure with the alternate path as option (here, i'm planning to install the alternate environment in /opt/python2.7) and compile/install

# ./configure --prefix=/opt/python2.7 --enable-shared # mkdir /opt/python2.7 # make # make altinstall

5. Export Shared Library and Bin Library in PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH on User profile 

# tail -3 /etc/profile ## Added for python 2.7 export PATH=$PATH:/opt/python2.7/bin export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/opt/python2.7/lib

6. Create ld.so.conf configuration file and run ldconfig to have library loaded system wide

# cat /etc/ld.so.conf.d/python27.conf /opt/python2.7/lib # ldconfig

7. Add the following to /etc/ansible/hosts on the Ansible Control Machine for the target node

my_ansible_node ansible_python_interpreter=/opt/python2.7/bin/python2.7  

8. Test again the ping module from ansible-server...

[esso_s@ansible-server ~]$ ansible my_ansible_node -m ping --ask-pass SSH password: my_ansible_node | success >> { "changed": false, "ping": "pong" }