From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0) Description of problem: I use a redhat 6.2 system as a remote boot server to perform kickstart installations. I find it nice to use "reboot" to skip the congratulation screen, but what I would like is to "shutdown" the installed system. How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Install via ks=nfs:192.168.1.1:/tftpboot/ks.cfg .... 2.Add a shutdown -h now to ks.cfg in the Post Install section Actual Results: The System crashed with a "kernel panic" unable to mount nfs 08:xx Expected Results: The system would properly unmount the filesystem it used, and whould halt Additional info: Is it possible to replace the reboot sequence in the installer with a few commands in the kickstart file? Or to add parameters to the reboot directive in ks.cfg?
N.B. : The remote server is RedHat 6.2 but this is not relevant. The kickstart is used to install redhat 7 and redhat 7.1.
The reason that calling shutdown in the %post doesn't work is because the installer is in a chroot environment, so that /mnt/sysimage appears to be / to the installer at that point. Calling shutdown from inside the chroot means that it can't find the real root filesystem, which causes the behavior that you are seeing. I talked to the other developers, and we agreed that to fix this properly would require a change to the loader (the first stage of the installer). The loader needs to remain as small as possible in order to fit on boot floppies and still leave room for drivers and such. Although I think that this feature could be useful in certain situations, I don't think it would benefit enough people to be worth implementing.