Kickstart Woes Revisited

["Parker, Robert" <Robert Parker compaq com>]

Im having a heck of a time getting certain functionalities of kickstart to
work well for me and Im hoping one or more of you guys might have some
insight.  

Im having two issues:

Problem #1:

Im installing RH7.1 onto a Compaq Proliant 1850R server with three disks
(raid-1 /, raid-5 /usr).  I want to simply have a single netboot.img floppy
that has a modified SYSLINUX.CFG such that it immediately kicks off the
ks.cfg on the floppy and performs an NFS install.  That much is simple, but
here's the kicker: these Proliant 1850Rs have an integrated TI ThunderLAN
(TLAN) interface and these interfaces are not supported by the default
kernel in the netboot.img.  I don't want to have to pop in another driver
disk when doing what I expect to be a completely handsfree (well, apart from
popping in and out the floppy) installation, nor do I want to go the silly
route of booting from cdrom then popping in the floppy and typing in "linux
ks=floppy" in order to get the richer kernel used on the cdrom (I realize I
could also use DHCP for this, but for various reasons which I wont go into,
DHCP is absolutely verboten in this environment).  I wouldnt mind a
non-network install, with the ks.cfg and install RPMs on a CD-RW, but
unhappily enough RH7.1 is on two cds now and as I mentioned, changing media
during install is too inelegant for my purposes here.  

So, Ive tried recompiling another kernel that only supports TLAN and other
very basic stuff and slapping it on the floppy, but no dice, half the time
the kernel wont boot.  Anyone have any ideas on how I can get TLAN support
on a netboot.img floppy kernel (yes, Ive tried the kernels avalable at
http://jpprime.free.fr/proliant/, and no, none of them have TLAN support)?
Perhaps someone who has a tried and true kernel config file that supports
TLAN and yet is bootable from a netboot.img floppy?  Any other methods Im
overlooking?   

Problem #2:

Sor some odd reason, all the commands I place in the %post section which are
directed to add a file or directory to the filesystem, always end up
appending a "?" character to the end of the filename (regardless of whether
its done chrooted or with --nochroot).  Heres an example:

|
|    %post
|
|     # Add another nameserver
|     echo "nameserver 10.10.0.2" >> /etc/resolv.conf
|

This will, after reboot, give me a file called "/etc/resolv.conf?"
containing   "nameserver 10.10.0.2".  This also happens, as I mention, when
I use the "%post --nochroot" directive with the /mnt/sysimage appended to
the pathnames.  Obviously, this also screws up any RPMs I might be
installing in the %post section, no matter what their "--root" directive is
set to.  So, uh, what gives here?  What am I doing wrong?  This didnt seem
to happen the last time I mucked around with kickstart in the 6.1 days.

Essentially, Ive got this pipedream that a Linux kickstart should be as easy
or easier than a handsfree Solaris Jumpstart.  Crazy me.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Robert Parker