Description of problem: The documentation regarding the "kssendmac" option is vague and incorrect. You can find it documented here :usr/share/doc/anaconda-9.1.6.9/command-line.txt Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): 9.1.6.9-1 The documentation states: kssendmac Adds HTTP headers to ks=http:// request that can be helpful for provisioning systems. Includes MAC address of all nics in a CGI environment variable of the form HTTP_X_RHN_PROVISIONING_0, HTTP_X_RHN_PROVISIONING_1, etc, for all nics. First off, it would make more sense if we called HTTP_X_RHN_PROVISIONING_0 (et all) headers, because that's what they are. Keeping that in mind, you would think that if you had one Nic on your machine, and used the kssendmac option, you would receive a header such as this: 'HTTP_X_RHN_PROVISIONING_0:00:13:21:0D:0E:09' Which is not correct. Upon trying to use this and it not working for me (and with some great help from the folks in #fedora-devel) I decided to sniff the traffic between the kickstarting machine and the buildserver.. The kickstarting machine sent over the following GET request to the buildserver: 'GET /./ks.cgi HTTP/1.0..Host: 192.168.1.100..X-RHN-Provisioning-MAC-2: eth0 00:02:A5:42:2F:F7' I've dumped that directly from ethereal. This tells me that the actual header that's being sent is: 'X-RHN-Provisioning-MAC-2: eth0 00:02:A5:42:2F:F7' So what's wrong with the doc? A few things: 1. The header does not have a prepended HTTP_ (as stated in the doc) 2. The header has dashes and not underscores (as stated in the doc, and the construction of that header can be verified here: anaconda-source-tree/loader2/urlinstall.c) 3. The header name ends with a 2 for reason's uknown-- it's the only NIC in the machine, it should be a 0. 4. The header value contains the device name for the NIC (not stated in the docs) How should the doc be fixed? It needs to be more explicit.. Give a direct example of what the header would look like. Explaining how the ordering of the header names is done, because it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the order of nics. Also, make all the above corrections as noted. Also, it would be helpful if the command-line.txt options made it into the RHEL official docs.
I've updated the documentation on anaconda CVS head, which doesn't really do much for RHEL3 or 4 but it's a start. I'm also reassigning this bug to the docs people to take care of your request for command-line.txt. Docs team - could you please pull in docs/command-line.txt from the anaconda package in future versions of the installation guide? This file describes all the various boot parameters that you can pass to anaconda and I don't know that they are concisely documented anywhere in our install guide, though anaconda does list them all. Unfortunately you need anaconda installed before you can read these docs to see what you can do with anaconda. Thanks.
This bug is filed against RHEL 3, which is in maintenance phase. During the maintenance phase, only security errata and select mission critical bug fixes will be released for enterprise products. Since this bug does not meet that criteria, it is now being closed. For more information of the RHEL errata support policy, please visit: http://www.redhat.com/security/updates/errata/ If you feel this bug is indeed mission critical, please contact your support representative. You may be asked to provide detailed information on how this bug is affecting you.