Hey Tsu2, thanks for your exhaustive answer!
I’ll need to re-read it a few times to completely grasp it, but from a first read I feel like autoyast may be the way to go for me.
What I need to achieve:
We have an “appliance” type of installation that we take to customers, plug into whatever environment they have, and ideally it installs all the way through without interaction. Only requirement is that the disk has at least 40 GiB and 10 GiB are on a seperate filesystem mounted on /var. Addidtionally, a custom bootsplash screen is to be added.
After the first login, a custom script starts that does the actual installation of the software and some system configuration and cleanup. I have a small local environment that adds all of this locally as I’m not allowed to upload it publicly.
Now what I used to do was use suse studio to create that iso file that does the installation. To have the correct partitioning, I put the following into config.kiwi:
<systemdisk name="systemVG">
<volume name="var" size="10240M" />
</systemdisk>
Unfortunately, that breaks the build on OBS now.
What we really do NOT want is add this system into any kind of management environment like puppet or chef as the software is pretty finicky about versions and we do not want people screwing around with it or the server.
To clarify, the software itself is publicly available (for a price) and we make our money by providing services around it, so we REALLY don’t want calls along the lines “I updated your appliance to a new major release of SuSE and now nothing works anymore!” 