Fedora 7 kickstart problem with rebuilt Everything image

[David Timms]

Howard Wilkinson wrote:
...
> First the version of yum available in updates currently is incompatible 
> with the version of anaconda. The problem is that this version of yum 
> does not create the headers directory and anaconda assumes it will exist.
> 
>    anaconda-11.2.0.66-1.i386.rpm
>    yum-3.2.1-1.fc7
Which headers directory ? {the dvd/everything repo doesn't have such a 
folder}

> To get round this we have reverted to yum-3.2.0-1.fc7.noarch.rpm for now 
> but will probably try out the development releases of anaconda and yum 
> next week.
It's very close {< week?} to freeze time for next fedora, if this an 
issue, prompt bugzilla check/report would be good.

> More worrying is a problem with dependencies in building the kernel 
> initrd images. The newly built Everything regime has the latest kernel - 
> kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7 - as available from updates.
I don't think this is correct:
http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/7/Everything/i386/os/Fedora/
kernel*-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.*.rpm

However, if you have inserted the newer kernel yourself, or are making 
updates repo available during the install then that is different.

In the kickstart.cfg can you request particular version install:
kernel-2.6.21-1.3194.fc7.*.rpm ?

This issue might also be checked/reported in bugzilla. Developers 
expected that people might want to enable repos during install, but 
perhaps had not considered the updates repo being active, and hence 
installing only the updated kernel/yum. IMHO ideally, I would want the 
release kernel and the latest released update kernel installed. If you 
use this process without the updates repo active, does it work ?

> But when the 
> kickstart install runs the mkinitrd cannot find /sbin/mdadm as the mdadm 
> package is not a dependency of the kernel (and should not be for all 
> builds but ....[1]) This has the effect of allowing the build to 
> complete but when the system reboots LVM cannot find the logical volume 
> groups because the raid has not started.
> 
>    /We build our systems with mirrored boot partitions on /dev/md0 and
>    mirrored /dev/md1 on the remainder of the disc with logical volumes
>    on this portion of the disc including the root partition. Hence the
>    problem above.[1]/
> 
> To get round this we are rebuilding the kernel to require the mdadm 
> package - but this is really not what we should be doing. Somewhere in 
> the RPM, YUM, Anaconda, regime we need to be able to specify that mdadm 
> (and lvm2) needs to be installed prior to the kernel installation, only 
> for our particular configurations not in general. Any ideas anybody?
I tried the soft raid /boot before in fc5 and found it no go. From 
memory there was work planned for either f7 or f8 to make this possible. 
Perhaps checkout http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Grub2ToDo

DaveT.