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Hi all,

We recently took receipt of Dell C6520 systems. These come with

2 x 256GB NVME boot devices (RAID)
2 x 8TB SSDs

1 x 1G EMBEDDED NIC
2 x 25G INTEGRATED NIC

For the sake of identification we will call these SRV 01-08

To say we are having problems is a slight understatement.  Initially we could 
not get these up without altering the BIOS settings.  UEFI boot setting in the 
BIOS was  necessary to recognise the various devices, this meant that GRUB_EFI 
was needed for FAI.  Disabling the 1G NIC was required as FAI wanted to create 
a BOND between the 1G and one of the 25G, so we have to also change the boot 
setting for this 25G NIC to be PXE.

Our end-user was adamant that we use UBU16 as he did not want to break any of 
his development work, or take a chance that something would not operate as 
before.  So we FAI’d to UBU 16 and all was fine.  However, a decision was then 
made to upgrade to UBU18. So we decided to re-FAI them instead of doing an 
in-place upgrade.  Out of 8 servers, 6 installed with UBU18 but decided to 
offer up ‘Diskfilter writes are not supported’ errors.  This results in NIC 
failures/issues on subsequent boot.

For one of the remaining two, the iDRAC decided to crap itself and all we can 
now do (until some living person presses the big red tit) is power cycle the 
server, no keyboard actions are possible at all.

A further decision was then made to FAI to UBU16 as this produced success 
across all servers, and we will do a release-upgrade. One has successfully 
completed, the non-responsive KVM is still non-responsive.

Our disk_config sets
1G for /boot/efi
The remainder is LVM2

Of the fails:

dhcp PREINIT eth0 up
dhcp FAIL
RTNETLINK answers: file exists

…and then drops to a dracut prompt.  So FAI seems to only find one of the two 
25G NICs (SOMETIMES!!) and thus fails.  This is odd because with a subsequent 
retry on SRV01 with UBU18, eth0 did not appear but eth1 did yet the FAI 
continued

For RTNETLINK, what file exists? Doesn’t FAI start with a clean slate??

So, for all 8 attempted UBU16 installs we have

SRV01 - success
SRV02 - success
SRV03  - No KVM
SRV04 – Fail, then boots to previous OS (UBU18) with DISKFILTER WRITES error
SRV05 – Fail, then boots to previous OS (UBU18) with DISKFILTER WRITES error
SRV06 – success
SRV07 – success
SRV08 – success

All hardware is the same, all BIOS settings are the same.  I have retried the 
fails several times and all return the same errors.

SRV01 - I tried a re-FAI using UBU18, eth0 did not appear in the messages but 
eth1 did.  UBU18 then completed but we end up with DISKFILTER error again, and 
no bond.  I tried again and eth0 appeared, as did eth1, yet I saw DHCP FAIL. 
This then results in DISKFILTER error yet again and I am of the opinion that 
FAI locating devices is an extremely hit and miss affair according to some 
strange sequential mis-logic.

SRV01 - I went back to UBU16 and all went without mishap.
SRV01 – I tried UBU20 and this also appeared to work fine.
FINALLY, back to UBU16 as we are unable (at this time) to use UBU20, and all 
installed without issue.

If anyone has any consistent success with this hardware, Ubuntu versions and 
FAI I’d appreciate some hints.

Thanks

Marc

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