Re: loader/stage2 interaction

[Chris Lumens <clumens redhat com>]

> 1. Look at local media (floppy, usb, ??) for a ks file. If one is found, 
> use it. By way of reference to another authority, this is what Windows 
> does.

I don't really like the idea of making kickstart file use quite this
automatic.  We've already got ks= that's easy to toss into PXE boot
arguments and so forth.  I suppose we could do some work on making it so
that ks=floppy automatically probes for a floppy drive, etc. though.

> A sane value for filename might be the install URL, or the ks file. Use of 
> other information such as log-servers, time-offset and ntp-servers would be 
> beneficial (the filesystem would have correct timestamps that really 
> reflect the time of the install).
>
> Implementation of one or both of these would mean that users could do 
> automatic installs with standard media, without having to key potentially 
> long and fairly meaningless strings of data such as the URL to an install 
> server.

I'm all for making these sorts of things more automatic, however.  Would
you believe me if I said we are already at least partially using values
out of DHCP for the kickstart file location:

   http://git.fedorahosted.org/git/?p=anaconda.git;a=blob;f=loader2/nfsinstall.c#l400

There's probably a lot more we can do there, though.  I don't think this
area has seen much activity at all lately.

As for using the other DHCP values like for ntp-servers, I'll have to
defer to David for how easy that might be.  I'm not really familiar with
the DHCP side of things.

- Chris