[sles-beta] network settings for SLES12 installation

[Steffen Winterfeldt]

Hi Eugen,

On Tuesday 2015-11-24 12:58, Eugen Block wrote:

> I have a question regarding the installation process of SLES12 since SP0. I 
> use virt-manager on a Xen host running on SLES11-SP3, but my question also 
> refers to installing xen-guests directly via config files.
> If I wanted to avoid network setup via dhcp on SLES11 VMs I used the 
> "Additional Arguments" in virt-manager, in the xen-config file it is the 
> "extra" line, where I used to provide information like "Netsetup=-dhcp,all 
> Hostname=<HOSTNAME> Domain=<DOMAIN> Hostip=<IP> Nameserver=<NAMESERVER> 
> Gateway=<GW>".
> If I use the same syntax with SLES12-SP0/SP1-RC2/SP1-RC3/SP1-GMC, I always get 
> into the linuxrc confirmation screen where all my entries are preselected (see 
> the attached screenshot), I just have to confirm them. So somehow linuxrc 
> knows what it is, but why do I have to confirm it?

The original plan is/was for netsetup to provide network setup dialogs. Like
netsetup=hostip,gateway should show two popups asking for hostip and gateway.
Likewise netsetup=-dhcp would just skip the question about dhcp usage.

What it actually does in sle11 is to show popups only if it thinks some data is
still needed. So netsetup=-dhcp hostip=10.10.0.1/16 will not ask for gateway or
nameserver (as it should) as linuxrc is fine setting up a network based on just
the ip and netmask.

The 'all' was just a hack making netsetup=dhcp,all run dhcp on all interfaces.

All in all the network config syntax was not in a good shape up to sle11.

So there is now in sle12 the 'ifcfg' option which lets you specify exactly
what you want to go into the ifcfg files without getting the linuxrc
guesswork in the way.

That said, I agree that 'netsetup' in sle12 is not perfect either. So if you
go ahead and make a bugreport, I will look into this for sp2.

> My colleage helped me and found a syntax where linuxrc doesn't ask for this 
> confirmation, but then the settings I have provided aren't stored anywhere. So

The network config is always copied to the target system.


Steffen