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I am currently in the progress of migrating our kickstart-files from CentOS 5 to CentOS 6.

In CentOS 5 there was a nice anaconda/kickstart-statement that allowed the inclusion of other kickstart-statements via http. Example:

%ksappend http://myinstallserver.intranet.domain/ks/fslayout_phys.include

When I try the same statement in CentOS 6.4 I get an error during installation:

The following problem occured on line 19 of the kickstart file:

Unable to open %%ksappend file

Does anyone out there know what the issue is there?

The official RH-documentation does not say anything about ksappend any more.

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For what it's worth, I don't see mention of %ksappend in the official RHEL5 docs, either.

There is mention of %include, though. And this looks very similar in function. Will it work for you?

The %ksappend url directive is very similar to %include in that it is used to include the contents of additional files as though they were at the location of the %ksappend directive. The difference is in when the two directives are processed. %ksappend is processed in an initial pass, before any other part of the kickstart file. Then, this expanded kickstart file is passed to the rest of anaconda where all %pre scripts are handled, and then finally the rest of the kickstart file is processed in order, which includes %include directives.

Thus, %ksappend provides a way to include a file containing %pre scripts, while %include does not.

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  • The other difference is that include can not use http. ksappend could.
    – Nils
    Jul 8, 2013 at 20:33
  • Where do you see that? It says %include <url> in the documentation?
    – Aaron Copley
    Jul 8, 2013 at 20:39
  • try it... I had no luck with include. Apart from that I want to include a %presection as well - which was also only possible with ksappend.
    – Nils
    Jul 9, 2013 at 10:34
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Looking at the source code, the error Unable to open %%ksappend file is raised if the kickstart parser could reach the url and download it, but the resulting file had some other sanity error or corruption. For example, the file was empty or the response contained no headers.

Check that your kickstarted server has an IP, DNS, and the url you're using is available from the network your server is on.

Here's a link to the rhel6 branch of the pykickstart code: https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/pykickstart.git/tree/pykickstart/parser.py?h=rhel6-branch#n99

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  • Since I am using a wget-script in the post-section that emulates what ksappend did there seems to be no problem. Have you a link to the sourcecode?
    – Nils
    Jan 5, 2014 at 19:30

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