Re: Kickstart Troubleshooting - Static IP - ESXi 5

When you pass those parameters in via the isolinux.cfg file, they end up in /var/log/esxi_install.log as unknown parameters - actual error is "Weasel skipped boot command line token". But you can parse the esxi_install.log file and get your parameter/values.  Unfortunately, grep, sed, and awk don't work quite right at that part of the install, I'm going to guess they aren't there yet, so we had to go a different route.  We were able to get to our parameters in a convoluted way using python.

After the firstboot line in the kickstart file, we created a python script, which scans the  esxi install log for our parameters/values, builds a separate file with our parameters as environement variables, sources the file and then we have access to the parameters as environment variables.

kickstart file pseudo code:

%firstboot --intepreter=busybox

cat > /tmp/getParams.py << EOF

import os

  Add python code (about 30 lines) to read and parse esxi_install.log and find your parameters (you can search on the Weasel text), e.g. HOST=hostname, IP=1.2.3.4 DOMAIN=domain.name etc.

  Write parameters to another file, (e.g.: /tmp/envParams) in the format

      export HOST=hostname

      export IP=1.2.3.4

      export DOMAIN=domain.name

   close all files

   EOF

   Execute the newly created python script in the kickstart file:  python /tmp/getParams.py

   And load the new environment varibles into your kickstart file:  source /tmp/envParams

   Those files will be deleted on the next reboot.

Then you can do anything you need using those parameters. e.g.

                       esxcli system hostname set --host=${HOST} --domain=${DOMAIN}