On Nov 12, 2014, at 16:35 , Stephen Berg (Contractor) wrote:

> I have a desktop system with Nvidia MCP55 ethernet chipset.  From my research this onboard NIC is supported in the kernel for SL7.

You corrected that statement in a reply - EL7 doesn't support this chip. Right?

>  I can get the system to pxeboot but dracut dumps out to a prompt since it can't find any network to do the kickstart install.

Is it really dracut? Or anaconda?

> Is there any way to force load the forcedeth.ko driver at pxeboot install time?  I have a dozen or so desktops that use the same NIC (SuperMicro H8DA8-2 motherboard) that are on the bubble to be re-installed with SL7 but so far this seems to be a show stopper.

If the NIC isn't supported, you'll have to provide a driver with every kernel update. ELrepo may help with this (after successful installation), but you'll have to check.

To get kickstart installs over the network going, the keyword is "driverdisk". Alas, the last time I had to resort to this was more than a decade ago, thus everything I know about it is outdated. The kickstart option seems still to be there, but I couldn't find any recent instructions how to create one. And then you'll have to make it available to the installer on a local device, since it's a network driver you need. I think back then I was using a floppy. Good grief...

NB It's not unlikely that more components on those systems are no longer supported. Maybe you should just take it as a strong hint to replace the systems before the EL6 EOL?

Anyway, hope this helps
	Stephan

> One additional oddity I've been seeing:  The anaconda screen I see says this is a pre-release.  Pretty sure I pulled the vmlinuz and initrd.img files from the release DVD iso.  I copied them again from a new download that passes the sha256sum check, and they appear to be identical.

-- 
Stephan Wiesand
DESY -DV-
Platanenenallee 6
15738 Zeuthen, Germany