Packer config for RHEL8 times out on boot. Nearly identical config for RHEL7 works fine.

Aaron Kulbe

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Jan 30, 2020, 12:55:56 PM1/30/20

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I'm having issues getting RHEL 8.1 to boot and start an install with Packer.

I took the working packer template for RHEL 7.7 and updated it to point to RHEL 8.1, so the changes are very minimal.

As one troubleshooting step, I took packer out of the picture and did a manual install of RHEL and passed the kernel arguments to point to the location of the RHEL 8.1 kickstart file. That worked fine.

I believe there's some issue with my packer config, but I'm not sure what it is. I've attached both templates for comparison.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Aaron Kulbe

packer_config_rhel7.json

packer_config_rhel8.json

Ciaran Courtney

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Feb 3, 2020, 4:33:45 AM2/3/20

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I believe the floppy driver was dropped in RHEL8, theres a related issue in github. Use http to serve kickstart instead.

Dan Linder

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Feb 3, 2020, 4:44:41 PM2/3/20

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@Ciaran - you are correct. The inst.ks has to be a network (http://) connection with RHEL-8 onward.

See this github discussion: https://github.com/jetbrains-infra/packer-builder-vsphere/issues/276

You will need something like inst.ks=http://{{ .HTTPIP }}:{{ .HTTPPort }}/ks.cfg in the "boot_command" section of your json file.

Dan

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