What precisely does "Installation Media" mean?

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1

Okay, I’m skipping around through the documentation trying to
get a quick read on how foreman works.

What precisely does “Installation Media” mean? Let me explain.
My kickstart server serves up centos 8 from this directory:
http://10.1.1.2/VOLUMES/www/html/KS/CentOS
That is to say, that’s where I unpacked the .iso file.
It’s real nice and everybody likes it.
But does foreman expect me to rename that to something like this:
http://10.1.1.2/VOLUMES/www/html/KS/centos/8.1/os/x86_64
or, does foreman mean that a directory with a name like
the above contains the still packed .iso file itself?

Is kickstart still going to work the way I’m used to? That is,
in the past I’ve always unpacked the .iso file. Does foreman/kickstart
somehow know to unpack the .iso on the fly? I’d rather it didn’t.
I’d rather unpack it myself (just once). Or am I worried about
nothing? I expect I don’t have to have both the .iso and the unpacked
.iso – thus using twice as much space.

thx.

2

Installation media is simply a URL to the installation source, so your unpacked ISO is fine, it simply has to provide packages and bootloader (kernel and vmlinuz).

While having a URL containing architecture, major and minor version makes sense in most cases, so you only have to define one media for multiple versions to install, you can provide every URL you want as long as the content is the right one.

2 Likes
3

https://docs.theforeman.org/guides/build/doc-Provisioning_Guide/index-foreman.html#Configuring_Provisioning_Resources

4

In order to push installation media to a smart-proxy, would one have to create a file repository and create a content view that pushes the content to each smart-proxy?
And then, would they have to create an installation media for each smart-proxy?
Is there a cleaner way, to do this without creating an installation media for each smart-proxy?