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Chapter 30. Installation and Booting

The installer no longer crashes when you select an incomplete IMSM RAID array during manual partitioning

Previously, if the system being installed had a storage drive which was previously part of an Intel Matrix (IMSI) RAID array which was broken at the time of the installation, the disk was displayed as Unknown in the Installation Destination screen in the graphical installer. If you attempted to select this drive as an installation target, the installer crashed with the An unknown error has occured message. This update adds proper handling for such drives, and allows you to use them as standard installation targets. (BZ#1465944)

Installer now accepts additional time zone definitions in Kickstart files

Starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, Anaconda switched to a different, more restrictive method of validating time zone selections. This caused some time zone definitions, such as Japan, to be no longer valid despite being acceptable in previous versions, and legacy Kickstart files with these definitions had to be updated or they would default to the Americas/New_York time zone.
The list of valid time zones was previously taken from pytz.common_timezones in the pytz Python library. This update changes the validation settings for the timezone Kickstart command to use pytz.all_timezones, which is a superset of the common_timezones list and which allows significantly more time zones to be specified. This change ensures that old Kickstart files made for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 still specify valid time zones.
Note that this change only applies to the timezone Kickstart command. The time zone selection in the graphical and text-based interactive interfaces remains unchanged. Existing Kickstart files for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 that had valid time zone selections do not require any updates. (BZ#1452873)

Proxy configuration set up using a boot option now works correctly in Anaconda

Previously, proxy configuration made in the boot menu command line using the proxy= option was not correctly applied when probing remote package repositories. This was caused by an attempt to avoid a refresh of the Installation Source screen if network settings were changed. This update improves the installer logic so that proxy configuration now applies at all times but still avoids blocking the user interface on settings changes. (BZ#1478970)

FIPS mode now supports loading files over HTTPS during installation

Previously, installation images did not support FIPS mode (fips=1) during installation where a Kickstart file is being loaded from an HTTPS source (inst.ks=https://<location>/ks.cfg). This release implements support for this previously missing functionality, and loading files over HTTPS in FIPS mode works as expected. (BZ#1341280)

Network scripts now correctly update /etc/resolv.conf

Network scripts have been enhanced to update the /etc/resolv.conf file correctly. Notably:
  • The scripts now update the nameserver and search entries in the /etc/resolv.conf file after the DNS* and DOMAIN options, respectively, have been updated in the ifcfg-* files in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ directory
  • The scripts now also update the order of nameserver entries after it has been updated in the ifcfg-* files in /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/
  • Support for the DNS3 option has been added
  • The scripts now correctly process duplicate and randomly omitted DNS* options (BZ#1364895)

Files with the .old extension are now ignored by network scripts

Network scripts in Red Hat Enterprise Linux contain a regular expression which causes them to ignore ifcfg-* configuration files with certain extensions, such as .bak, .rpmnew or .rpmold. However, the .old extension was missing from this set, despite being used in documentation and in common practice. This update adds the .old extension into the list, which ensures that script files which use it will be ignored by network scripts as expected. (BZ#1455419)

Bridge devices no longer fail to obtain an IP address

Previously, bridge devices sometimes failed to obtain an IP address from the DHCP server immediately after system startup. This was caused by a race condition where the ifup-eth script did not wait for the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) to complete its startup. This bug has been fixed by adding a delay that causes ifup-eth to wait long enough for STP to finish starting. (BZ#1380496)

The rhel-dmesg service can now be disabled correctly

Previously, even if the rhel-dmesg.service was explicitly disabled using systemd, it continued to run anyway. This bug has been fixed, and the service can now be disabled correctly. (BZ#1395391)