Re: How to constrain the install through kickstart to one drive

Hi Maarten,

Thanks again for a very informative reply. I never thought to think of
the /proc/partitions file. This looks like a good choice to use. Thanks
very much for your time on this.

Phil

On September 19, 2007 08:35:44 Broekman, Maarten wrote:
Unfortunately, I'm at a loss. The environment I'm in is all SCSI disks
on hardware raid controllers. I would guess that libata is the ATA
driver. Looking in /proc/partitions though I can see all the partitions
on the disks that the OS can see.

/proc # cat partitions
major minor #blocks name

104 0 35565360 cciss/c0d0
104 1 104391 cciss/c0d0p1
104 2 2096482 cciss/c0d0p2
104 3 5245222 cciss/c0d0p3
104 4 1 cciss/c0d0p4
104 5 5245191 cciss/c0d0p5
104 6 20772013 cciss/c0d0p6
104 7 2096451 cciss/c0d0p7
104 16 35565360 cciss/c0d1

On my virtual systems, I can see the following:
# cat /proc/partitions
major minor #blocks name rio rmerge rsect ruse wio wmerge wsect
wuse running use aveq

8 0 17825792 sda 21808 13601 274314 65860 223847 214442 3515998
259910 0 90050 325770
8 1 104391 sda1 58 630 1376 220 41 30 142 310 0 500 530
8 2 2096482 sda2 24 114 312 20 0 0 0 0 0 20 20
8 3 7221217 sda3 27 100 338 80 25 13 280 1310 0 950 1390
8 4 1 sda4 1 0 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0
8 5 3148708 sda5 1818 6820 68426 18140 42791 31850 597496
60360 0 26230 78500
8 6 3148708 sda6 19781 5569 202770 47340 180599 180332 2897160
194660 0 68550 242000
8 7 2096451 sda7 40 99 434 50 391 2217 20920 3270 0 1530 3320

On the other hand, lsmod shows the cciss module on my physicals and
either the Buslogic or mptscsi driver on my virtuals. That's what I use
to make my determination in the %pre section.

In thinking about this some more, /proc/partitions might be a better way
to determine which drive to partition and how since you are shown all
the drives and partitions that the OS can see (column 4) as well as
their block size (1K blocks) (column 3).

Maarten Broekman

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Phil Savoie
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 9:24 PM
To: redhat-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: How to constrain the install through kickstart to one drive

Thanks Maarten,

Just curious now... I did an lsmod on 2 machines. On one I see the ahci
and
the libata modules loaded. I don't see these on a machine with IDE
drives
installed. Am I to assume these are the modules for SATA/PATA? If so,
good.
I did not see anything that stood out to me indicating a module for IDE
disks
on the IDE only machine with lsmod. Would you know what module I should
be
looking for?

Thanks in advance,

Phil

On Tuesday 18 September 2007 14:45, Broekman, Maarten wrote:
If you always know that the drive you want to install on is /dev/sda,
--ondisk will do the trick. The tricky part comes if different

machines

have their drives addressed in different ways (/dev/hda, /dev/sda,

etc).

In those cases you can still use a single ks file be creative use of

the

%pre section to determine the correct disk name to clear and

partition.

I use a single ks file for each RHEL (one for RHEL3, one for RHEL4,

etc)

regardless of whether I'm installing on a physical machine
(/dev/cciss/c0d0) or virtual machine (/dev/sda) by checking the loaded
modules (lsmod) in the %pre section and then changing the partition
table accordingly. This also lets me address different drive sizes in
different ways.

On the other hand, the kickstart files become a bit more complicated

and

the chance of errors in the kickstart file go up, but it is possible.
The use of multiple kickstart files also depends on the application
loadout of the systems you're installing on. If all the systems get

the

same package load, then one kickstart file is easy to maintain. If
different servers get different loads, then it's much easier to manage
that with multiple kickstart files.

Maarten Broekman

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:redhat-list-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Phil Savoie
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 2:28 PM
To: redhat-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: How to constrain the install through kickstart to one

drive

Thanks for responding both Andrew and Maarten.

Ok then, I was hoping that there was a way to say, regardless of what
drives
are installed in the pc, just load the drive that's hanging off

Primary

Master and leave the rest alone? This is basically what I want to do.
I
just didn't want to go through the pc's to find out exactly what type

of

drives are installed. Not to start an OS flame war but I can do this

in

Solaris using the keyword "bootdisk" in the jumpstart profile. Just
wondering if there was something similar in ES4.

Thank you again, for your time...

Phil

On September 18, 2007 13:28:28 Andrew Bacchi wrote:
You can't always use one size fits all. We have many kickstart

files

for our many servers. Each kickstart is tailored for a type of

server

and we use the type that best suits our needs.

So, the ondisk=sda/hda problem is solved by using the appropriate
kickstart file. At the install screen we define which kickstart to

use

with "linux ks=kickstart_file_name".

Phil Savoie wrote:
HI All,

I have a number of machines I would like to install using

kickstart.

This isn't the problem as this I know how to do...but, some pc's

have

more than one HD installed. Some of the pc's have pata, sata or

ide

drives; that is a mixture of all I have mentioned. In order to

combat

the problem of kickstart not working on all types of disks, I took

out

the ondisk=[s|h]da. This works well on a pc with a single disk.

With

more than one disk, the second disk also get a filesystem. I

don't

want

the second disk touched at all. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks in advance,

Phil

--
veritatis simplex oratio est
-Seneca

Andrew Bacchi
Systems Programmer
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
phone: 518.276.6415 fax: 518.276.2809

http://www.rpi.edu/~bacchi/

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