Using the following in my kickstart template, I was able to render the mac address for eth0: $getVar('$mac_address_eth0') Confirmed working using the following command which prints out the rendered kickstart profile: cobbler system getks --name=<system_name> On Tue, Feb 23, 2010 at 9:58 AM, Luc de Louw <luc(a)delouw.ch&gt; wrote:

On 02/23/2010 04:11 PM, Kelsey Hightower wrote: I'm a bit concerned about the wiki entry at https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/wiki/KickstartSnippets because it figures out that it is simply not working with current cobbler versions. If nobody complains, I'm going to update the informations there. Thanks, Luc

On 02/23/2010 08:45 PM, Byron Pezan wrote: Dear Byron, Thanks a lot for your input, we have similar issues here. Changing MAC addresses only affects virtual VMWare servers but not pysical ones. The main reason why we want to detect virtual systems is to install the VMWare tools on ESX guests and the hardware management software plus the backup-client on pysical hosts. At the moment ESX guests are recognized very well, but the VMWare-tools are stuck when running vmware-config-tools.pl because the network will be shut down. This brings me to the point: WHEN should we fire up vmware-config-tools.pl? Obviously not before the final steps but before the reboot after kickstarting has been completed. Any hints are very appreciated. Thanks, Luc

glad to share it. i'm basically using a specific file to determine whether this is the first boot or not and touching the file after my first pass. then each subsequent run will notice the existence of the file and skip the first boot portion of the script. you'll also notice some RHEL registration code, i did this in rc.local and not with the builtin snippets because we have a satellite server and RHN (with different keys no doubt) so I use a ksmeta variable to build a file containing the necessary registration info. this allows me to register different systems with different RHN / satellite keys. the section of the script that runs at every boot simply checks to see if the VMware tools need to be rebuilt, typically due to a kernel upgrade. that last bit was taken pretty much verbatim from a post found on the wild wild web, i can't take credit for it. byron -------------rc.local------------- # run some stuff on the first boot if [ ! -e /etc/sysconfig/blah/firstboot ]; then # install vmware tools if this is a VM and it's the first boot if [ ! -e /etc/vmware-tools/ ] && /usr/sbin/dmidecode | grep -iq "product name: vmware virtual platform"; then echo "VMware detected" wget "http://X.X.X.X/prov/pkgs/vmwaretools.tgz" --output-document=/tmp/vmwaretools.tgz echo "Installing VMware tools" cd /tmp tar zxf vmwaretools.tgz cd vmware-tools-distrib/ /usr/bin/perl vmware-install.pl -d fi # if cobbler created the rhel_reg file let's register this system if [ -e /etc/sysconfig/swrx/rhel_reg ] && grep -iq "red.hat" /etc/redhat-release; then # the haldaemon needs to be running in order to register if /sbin/pidof hald; then # source the register variables . /etc/sysconfig/swrx/rhel_reg # register the system /usr/sbin/rhnreg_ks --serverUrl=$RHEL_URL --sslCACert=$RHEL_CERT --activationkey=$RHEL_KEY # update the system yum -y update fi fi # touch the firstboot file so the above code doesn't run anymore mkdir -p /etc/sysconfig/blah touch /etc/sysconfig/blah/firstboot # reboot system with new packages and kernel modules reboot else # code below this point will run every boot after the first # reinstall vmware tools if the kernel has updated on subsequent boots rkernel=`uname -r` if [ -e /etc/vmware-tools/not_configured ]; then echo "vmware-tools not configured for running kernel $rkernel" echo "running vmware-config-tools.pl" /usr/bin/vmware-config-tools.pl -d echo "vmware-tools now compiled for running kernel $rkernel" echo "restarting networking" /etc/init.d/network restart echo "network restarted" fi fi exit 0 -------------rc.local----------------- -----Original Message----- From: cobbler-bounces(a)lists.fedorahosted.org [mailto:cobbler-bounces@lists.fedorahosted.org] On Behalf Of Joe Wulf Sent: Tuesday, February 23, 2010 3:39 PM To: cobbler mailing list Subject: Re: How to find out the MAC address of a system Byron, I am interested, thank you.