RHEL6 UEFI provisioning

Support
1

Hi,

I’m wishing to provision RHEL6 using a UEFI bootloader and PXE boot, with Ansible creating the host via API.

Is this achievable? I’m able to do this for RHEL7 using a grub2 bootloader in the hostgroup.

Thanks,
Graham

2

We don’t extensively test this, but it should work. Use grub1 with RHEL6 and report back please. You can’t use discovery PXE-less tho.

3

Hi Lukas,

I’ve got UEFI boot RHEL6 deploying OK now using MAC-based config file but am unable to get discovery working with grub1/efidefault/bootx64.efi

What do I need in efidefault please?

Regards,

Graham

4

Hmmm there might be a way to initialize all network devices, try to add “fdi.initnet=all BOOTMAC=AA:BB:CC:DD:EE:FF”. Providing all option will force FDI to initialize all network adapters via DHCP and BOOTMAC fake MAC address will initiate discovery. But no device will be marked as primary, this will be problem at later stage which may be workarounded by setting discovery_fact setting to “macaddress”. If puppet detect the main interface correctly that could do it. Foreman needs to know which MAC address is the provisioning one, otherwise Grub configuration will be incorrectly set. This might work if your servers all has just one interface (e.g. VMs with VLAN).

This is untested workflow, it’s unreliable, I’d rather switch back to BIOS in this case if possible (some vendors no longer provide the switch anymore).

5

Hello, what is the status? Did it work?

6

We’ve not gone down the route of trying to get RHEL6 UEFI discovery working as looked a little too unreliable for our purposes.

Thanks for your help.
Graham