Hello,
I mainly provision Ubuntu builds with Foreman and now with Katello (thanks to pulps deb support 
) in our enterprise and have been trying to figure out how i can get discovery to successfully kexec into the building phase. We have it set up for a PXE-less environment. Once the machine is discovered in Foreman and configure settings to provision, it will kick off the kexec command but just reboots and loops back to the discovery image. Can we troubleshoot this issue and possibly bring some support for the Debian community? Thank you!
Hello, of course let’s track it down. First, how do you boot the PXE-less ISO? Is this USB stick, CDROM or ISO file attached to a VM?
Tell me more about “it kicks of the kexec command”, how do you know? Have you followed kernel logs on the discovered node?
You can try to kexec manually, preview the KExec template and copy and paste the kernel and initramdisk and append line, then download the kernel/initramdisk onto a discovered node into /tmp and perform kexec manually. You can add various verbose/debug flags, see kexec(3) man page for more info.
We have tested kexec with RHEL7 -> RHEL7, there are issues when trying to kexec older kernels like from RHEL6 - this might not work. What Debian version are you trying to kexec? Can you try older/newer release to rule this out?
Thanks, I was just able to figure it out and got it working today. Adding the initrd.lz and vmlinuz.efi to the discovered node and running kexec manually worked. I now have the discovery debian kexec template pointing to the url location for the kernel and initram. Then watched the foreman/production.log for errors and eventually got it working! Thank you.