starting Fedora Server SIG

[Chuck Anderson]

On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 01:14:01PM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> Chuck Anderson wrote:
>> On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 08:20:14AM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
> different ethernet adapters.  You can boot in rescue mode from the  
> install CD and have your old partitions automatically mounted, so  
> obviously it is possible to figure the driver issues out - but the thing  
> that can figure it out won't fix things for you.  So first you have to  
> get the right drivers to be included and get rid of the old ones by  
> twiddling modprobe.conf in some magic ways, build a new initrd, and  
> perhaps re-configure grub to use it.  And if you restored from a backup,  
> add in making sure the partition identifiers (whatever they might be  
> this week) match the identifiers in /etc/fstab or you won't even get to  
> the point where the rescue boot will mount the system to fix it.  You  
> also have  much the same problem when adding new hardware after the  
> initial install or if you swap NIC or disk controller cards.  Everyone  
> needs this basic capability.  Server admins just need to be able to  
> repeat it predictably across a lot of machines.
>
> Once you have the machine in bootable condition with the right drivers  
> connected to the available hardware, you need a way to interactively  
> explore the new hardware without a gui, sort of like running 'fdisk -l'  
> will enumerate the drives and current partitioning, but this tool has to  
> be adapted to any new ways of describing mountable objects.  Similarly a  

blkid ?

> tool like mii-tool should enumerate your NICs and show which have link  
> established - and any other useful information they can detect.  Then,  

ethtool ?

> once you understand the setup for any hardware type you need to be able  
> to script it repeatably for any number of instances with a way to supply  
> whatever variables it might need (i.e. mac addresses, UUID's, etc.).
>
> My objections to the changes in fedora are not so much related to any  
> details of a change but that they aren't encompassed by scriptable text  
> based tools that list and set the options or if those exist they are  
> fragmented into a bunch of choices that have to match whatever anaconda  
> did that you may not know about.

It probably wouldn't take too much to write a script around blkid and 
ethtool to do this.