coreos-installer mount device pre-installation

[Joel Kessler]

Hi there,

Another question. This time related to the installation of fedora coreos.

My current goal is to install a bare metal machine completely offline, meaning I would like to run:
> coreos-installer install /dev/nvme0n1 --image-file /mnt/insdev/fedora_coreos.raw.xz --ignition  /mnt/insdev/ignition.ign

This works without a doubt when I manually pre-mount my installation device (live iso) like this:
> sudo mkdir /mnt/insdev
> sudo mount -t auto -v /dev/sdb1 /mnt/insdev

(And then the installer install command)

But in my scenario I would like to have this fully automated. Therefore I tried to execute the mkdir and mount command on the grub.cfg file level.
> linux /images/vmlinuz mitigations=auto,nosmt systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0 coreos.liveiso=fedora-coreos-31.20200113.3.1 rd.neednet=1 ip=dhcp ignition.firstboot ignition.platform.id=metal coreos.inst.ignition_url=/mnt/insdev/ignition.ign coreos.inst.install_dev=/dev/nvme0n1 coreos.inst.image_url=/mnt/insdev/fedora_coreos.raw.xz coreos.inst=yes coreos.inst.insecure

My assumption is that this mounting would be required to be run on the /vmlinuz. Is there any way to tell the kernel to mount this device automatically to my defined location, so I can achieve my goal?

In the end my installation process should look like this:
> Create iso (from official live iso)
> Add folder on usb stick
> Copy required install files in folder
> Boot from iso, which automatically triggers coreos install

[Joel Kessler]

TLDR

Is there any way to do a full offline installation from a single USB device?
My goal would be that my grub.cfg looks similar to somthing like that.

linux /images/vmlinuz mitigations=auto,nosmt systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0 coreos.liveiso=fedora-coreos-31.20200113.3.1 rd.neednet=1 ip=dhcp ignition.firstboot ignition.platform.id=metal ignition.firstboot ignition.platform.id=metal coreos.inst.ignition_url=(hd0,gpt1)/ignition/ignition.ign coreos.inst.install_dev=/dev/nvme0n1 coreos.inst.image_file=(hd0,gpt1)/images/fedora_coreos.raw.xz coreos.inst=yes coreos.inst.insecure

Where (hd0,gpt1) represents the device the live image is currently running on. (/dev/sda)

Is there any way I can access my data on the USB in this fully automated approach? We are not able to connect to the internet in this scenario or have additional ressources. (Only single USB)

[Jonathan Lebon]

On Wed, Feb 26, 2020 at 3:08 AM Joel Kessler  wrote:
> TLDR
>
> Is there any way to do a full offline installation from a single USB device?
> My goal would be that my grub.cfg looks similar to somthing like that.

See the related upstream issue at
https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/352.

This is something we are working to address. In the meantime, one
approach is to customize the ISO before flashing it onto the USB
stick. See an example of this at
https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/377.