Have Kickstart automatically generate a root password on install

Question

I am currently working on multiple Kickstart configs for my company to allow for easy VM deployment. I cannot find any documentation showing how to have Kickstart generate a root password. Is it possible? If not, can I pipe in output from python or the likes into the rootpw option?

Answer 1

what I do in this situation is generate a 100char long string and then strip randomly out of it from the beginning and the end and then just grab the first X (15 in my case) chars

[...kickstart...]

%post
    HOWLONG=15 ## the number of characters 
    NEWPW=$(< /dev/urandom tr -dc A-Za-z0-9 | head -c100 | head -c$((20+($RANDOM%20))) | tail -c$((20+($RANDOM%20))) | head -c${HOWLONG});
    echo "${NEWPW}" |  passwd --stdin  root

    [... rest of the %post block ...]
%end

[...kickstart...]