customizations.timezone not supported in fedora-44/server-network-installer

[wt]

See here for the descriptions of the server-network-installer targets on fedora 44. The profile does not support options like timezone. There are many other customizations that are available in pxe-tar-xz that might be useful in server-network-installer also, e.g. fips, openscap, firewall, etc.

[supakeen]

To be clear; the request here is to have customizations.timezone be translated to a kickstart option, and not to apply it to the installer environment itself?

[wt]

To be clear; the request here is to have customizations.timezone be translated to a kickstart option, and not to apply it to the installer environment itself?

That is correct. Ideally have the settings apply to the installed system. Hostname is another that probably makes sense in a similar way.

[brlane-rht]

server-network-installer is the equivalent of the traditional boot.iso, if you want to customize the installed system you should be using a kickstart with it.

[supakeen]

server-network-installer is the equivalent of the traditional boot.iso, if you want to customize the installed system you should be using a kickstart with it.

The request here is though; why not generate that kickstart in image-builder from the customizations in the blueprint. We already do so for (some) other customizations; for example users.

All that would require is plumbing it into kickstart.New() in pkg/customizations/kickstart.go.

[brlane-rht]

Personally I find the mixing of blueprint and kickstart confusing. In my way of thinking the blueprint is for customizing the image you are building (the netinst iso), and kickstarts are for the system being installed. We've gone far enough down this path that I'm not exactly sure what applies where without looking at the code.

[wt]

@brlane-rht I think that this is a reasonable take.

However, I think there are reasons to consider implementing the customizations. The kickstart file contents are a blob to image-builder. There isn't a lot of validation that image-builder can do to the kickstart. Customizations can have validations that cause an error during image-builder building the image, that may provide a faster dev-test-release cycle for building images since you won't have to boot and image and try to use it before knowing if the image is correct.

If that is the direction you want to go, it might be nice to do two things to the docs.

1. Don't say that certain customizations land in the kickstart file. See here for example.
2. Either get rid of sudo-nopasswd, or maybe make it work with a specified kickstart file?
3. Same for the user customization.

It might also be useful to link to kickstart docs (which I have not been able to find via duckduckgo or google). I have found this, but nothing in the fedora wiki or fedora server docs.

[brlane-rht]

Yes, those are the upstream kickstart docs. Also, you can use ksvalidator to validate your kickstart before adding it.