starting Fedora Server SIG

Chuck Anderson cra at WPI.EDU
Fri Nov 21 15:20:33 UTC 2008


On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 08:20:14AM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> Matej Cepl wrote:
>>> On 2008-11-20, 07:00 GMT, Les Mikesell wrote:
>>>> Maybe - but it isn't a real solution.  You still have to deal with  
>>>> identifying the device before and during the labeling process.  If  
>>>> you can do that, you didn't really need the label.
>>>
>>> Sorry, maybe I don't understand, but what's so difficult on the  
>>> following?
>>>
>>> tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 |awk '/UUID/ {print $3}'
>>>
>>
>> The disk may be unformatted at this point and not have a UUID. 
>
> I know it is bad form to follow up to my own posting, but I think I've  
> been making my argument in the wrong way so far.  I'm not really against  
> changes in the way things are done or even the details of those changes  
> as long as they are exposed somehow.  What I am against is hiding those  
> changes in anaconda or other parts of the installer process so that the  
> only reasonable way to build several machines is to automate the way you  
> interact with anaconda with another tool like cobbler, and after it is  
> built you can't change anything.
>
> We need a way to do the things that only anaconda knows how to do at  
> times other than the initial install.  For example, you want to move a  
> working system disk to another machine, or replace the booting disk  
> controller, or restore your backups onto a similar system.  Or clone a  
> bunch of copies of the same boot/system disk and expect them to run in  
> different machines.  It doesn't really matter how this is accomplished,  
> just that there is a plan for it and hopefully it doesn't involve a  
> human needing to know every possible thing that anaconda knows about  
> hardware.   Could there be a way to re-run anaconda after moving a  
> system to new hardware and do an automatic fix-up?

I thought good disks had built-in UUIDs in the firmware (perhaps this 
is only for Fibre Channel).  Or you could use the serial number which 
shows up under "smartctl -a" to identify physical disks.  And some 
fancy disk shelves have "identify disk" commands which blinks some LED 
on the front of the disk.

Once you know which physical disk is the one you want, you can clone 
to that disk and then reset the UUIDs or LABELs to unique values.




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