ISO Installs Not Processing after-install Webhooks.

[ParadoxGuitarist]

What steps did you take and what happened:

• PXE boot an install off the generated iso created by the Elemental install via rancher.
• Add either a kernel command (ie stages.after-install[0].commands[0]="curl -k http://goodhost.local/elemental/ifnames.sh | bash" of values in a yaml into /oem or some other location with stages.after-install-chroot declared in it. Ie:

name: "Setup Extra Disks for Longhorn and Network Interface Names."
stages:
  after-install-chroot:
  - commands:
    - sleep 300
    - curl -k http://198.18.0.5/elemental/longhorndisks.sh | bash
    - curl -k http://198.18.0.5/elemental/ifnames.sh | bash

• The system installs the OS, unmounts the disks and reboots immediately. (not gracefully via systemd)
• On reboot, the system boots off the disk and none of the previous commands/plans are saved. The system does not process the post-install after-install-chroot or after-install sections.

What did you expect to happen:
You would expect to see those commands get processed, but instead the installer unmounts the partitions that it installed to and immediately resets (reboots) the server without processing the after-install sections.

Anything else you would like to add:
Part of the driver behind this issue is that we're attempting to set up bonds for network interfaces. Since the default for net.ifnames=0 the defaults need to be changed. Ideally, we'd be able to simplly run sed -i 's/net.ifnames=0/net.ifnames=1/g' /etc/elemental/bootargs.cfg in the after-install-chroot stage allowing the network interfaces to come up with the bond correctly.

Environment:

• Elemental release version (use cat /etc/os-release): SL-Micro 6.1 - image: baremetal-os-container:2.2.0-4.4 (from /etc/os-release) elemental:106.0.1+up1.6.9 (From helm)
• Rancher version: 2.12.1
• Kubernetes version (use kubectl version):
• Cloud provider or hardware configuration: Baremetal

[davidcassany]

@ParadoxGuitarist I suspect you are facing a couple of issues:

• Install hooks are not applicable from the MachineRegistration resource. This is a known issue in elemental-register since v1.7 which is impacting Micro 6.1 OS images. This is a regression caused by this change which adds the cloud configuration provided by the machine registration as an after-install hook, as the configuration is added in at late point during the installation the after-install-* are not longer applicable in a MachineRegistration.
• kernel command line yip configuration is not functional for after-install hooks or any stage including - in its key... there is an issue with the dotToYAML conversion preventing those to converted into an actual valid yaml.

How to execute an after-install-chroot stage during the installation then?

The workaround is setting it as part of the SeedImage cloud config. SeedImage cloud config is meant to be used to add Yip configuration for the ISO itself. Since the ISO it the actual responsible of running the installation we can add a before-install hook which adds the desired after-install-chroot hook. Consider the following SeedImage.spec.cloud-config example:

spec:
  cloud-config:
    stages:
      before-install:
      - name: "Include an after-install-chroot hook"
        files:
        - path: "/run/elemental/oem/after-install-chroot-hook.yaml"
          content: |
            stages:
              after-install-chroot:
              - commands:
                - echo "Testing after-install-chroot hook" > /etc/elemental/after-install-chroot

With a SeedImage including this setup the resulting ISO will include the after-install-chroot as part of the chrooted environment during the installation. Then after booting the installed system the /etc/elemental/after-install-chroot file is present.

Meanwhile, I am experimenting to bring back the capability of adding after-install hooks as part of the MachineRegistration.

[davidcassany]

A patch to fix the regression on after-install hooks applied in a MachineRegistration has been prepared and it is in the pipes to be backported to the affected OS images.