Kickstart issues in RHEL6 Beta

[Bryan Schneiders]

One of the snippets in cobbler moved away from list-harddrives to using /proc/partitions to be more reliable.

Their old code looked like this:
-drives=$(list-harddrives | awk '{print $1}')
-for disk in $drives; do
-    DISKS="$DISKS $(fdisk -l /dev/$disk | awk '/^\/dev/{print $1}')"
-done

Their new code looks like this:
+DISKS=$(awk '{if ($NF ~ "^[a-zA-Z].*[0-9]$" && $NF !~ "c[0-9]+d[0-9]+$") print "/dev/"$NF}'  /proc/partitions)
+# In the awk line above we want to make list of partitions, but not devices/controllers
+# cciss raid controllers have partitions like /dev/cciss/cNdMpL, where N,M,L - some digits, we want to make sure 'pL' is there
+#

I hope this helps. The leading - and + are from the patch.


Bryan Schneiders

On 04/26/2010 11:55 PM, Chris Lumens wrote:
>> 1) /tmp/netinfo is now gone.  This is one of the most widely
>> documented place to easily get the network info when doing a %pre or
>> %post script.  I guess I will write some new code to get the info
>> manually out of ifconfig etc.. but a note about this would be nice in
>> the EL6 release notes since lots of people probably use this today in
>> EL5 kickstart scripts.
>
> /tmp/netinfo was an implementation detail and a bit of a hack - really,
> a way for anaconda's stage2 to know what loader set up.  loader doesn't
> set up networking anymore.  NetworkManager does that.  Therefore, we
> don't require netinfo anymore.  anaconda can get all that from dbus
> instead of having to write out a file and read it back in again later.
>
>> 2) In the current EL6 beta, the "list-harddrives" command inside the
>> anaconda environment is totally broken if you have a CDROM drive.  It
>> crashes with an error of "unknown disk label" from the python code.  I
>> believe that this little utility was widely used in %pre and %post
>> scripts as well.   It was the quickest way to get a list of all the
>> disks on the system and their info.  I used it to verify the correct
>> drive sizes and to automatically choose the first correct disk to
>> install to in my kickstart.  I even used a formula based on the disk
>> size info from list-harddrives to calculate the size of the swap lv.
>
> File a bug, but please don't use any of the command stubs unless you
> absolutely have to.  They do not recieve much of any testing or fixing.
>
> - Chris
>
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