Roland Nagtegaal a �crit :
>
> Hello cookers,
>
> I'm a linux-admin by profession, so I can say I have a lot of
> experience with different distros. Not with mandrake yet though,
> so here is my story how I failed get my 8.0 installation right, and
> had to go for RedHat 7.1 instead, much to my regret.
>
> I have a system at home with two hardrives, with
> a / on a raid1 and /usr, /opt, /var, /data2 on raid0 filesystems.
> I had RedHat 6.1 running.
>
> At first I thought the partioning/filesystem tool was nice and
> logical, but it appeared to be extremely buggy where it comes to raid
> systems.
I had tested the 8.0 installation on RAID (0 and 1) software partitions
before the final release and there had been some problems, but I had
reported them to the install team and they had solved my issues, so I am
a bit surprised that your intall was not successful.
I have just redone an installation to check. Unfortunately I have only
one IDE harddrive, but that should be OK.
Install expert using standard download CDs, security medium.
I have first created two partitions (same size 1 Gb) as RAID and added
them to a RAID 1 device. When I wanted to create an ext2 partition in
the RAID device as / filesystem, the installer warned me that no
bootloader supports this and that I would have to create a separate
/boot partition to make it work. I did it as a separate ReiserFS
partition. I added then 4 different partitions to RAID 0 (md1 to md4 as
RAID 1), created ext2 filesystems on them as /usr, /opt, /var and
/data2,
formatted them and had not problem at all installing software on them
and then rebooting my system.
> It would let me make the /dev/md0 ... /dev/md4 systems, but then
> at the formatting stage it gave an error about mount-points and
> /dev/md0 not actually existing and bring me back to the
> partitioning tool again.
> I tried with the shell prompt under ctrl-alt-f2, and after many
> tries I got it working:
>
> First: it is an extremely limited shell: backspace does not work,
> no completion, there is no editor, so when you need to edit a file
This is the ash shell : limited, but small size and memory footprint.
I do have the Backspace key working, but this seems related to the
keyboard configuration that you choose : Netherland keyboard config
seems to be broken (for the Backspace), you can switch with a
'loadkeys us' for example.
I agree with you on the "no editor" complaint, I know Debian boot system
uses ae on their bootdisk, lightweight, but functional and symlinks to
vi and emacs keymaps (more/less).
> you must use sed, and something like "cat /etc/raidtab".
> I made a /etc/raidtab with the right entries that way, I did
> modprobe raid0 raid1 raid5, I made the right mountpoints in /mnt
> (all in the ramdisk filesystem), ran raidstart -c /etc/raidtab /dev/md0
> and after much trial and error finally got the install program so far
> that it would believe my filesystems where there and it got to
> installing packages in there.
>
> Then the installer crashed completely, no numlock, nothing, right after
> the last package got installed. No kernel or lilo was installed yet,
> so I had to do it all over again including including the pain with the
> raid stuff.
> This time it did not crash, and after rebooting the computer came up
> with a quite beautiful graphical lilo boot screen, and subsequently
> with a nice graphical boot.
>
> Then it went wrong again. The booting stopped with a kernel panic:
> cannot mount root on device 09:00, which is the device number for
> /dev/md0, my / on a raid1 device. Somehow the booting kernel
> would not auto-run my raid-devices although it should. This of course
> sucks majorly, because you absolutely cannot get into your system,
> unless you get really creative.
> So I got creative. I booted with the cdrom again, made the /etc/raidtab
> by typing it in with 'cat /etc/raidtab' again, probed the modules, ran
> the raid devices etc.etc.
> Then I mounted the /boot partition (which is not raid of course), found
> the right kernel there, copied it to a floppy, mounted the /usr filesystem
> so I could get to the rdev program, and did a rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/md0.
> Then I booted with the floppy, with exactly the same result: kernel panic.
>
> Mandrake people: your kernel does not boot from raid when installed
> with your installation software, and it should, otherwise the software
> should have given me a warning about this.
> And if the idea is that the kernel should load modules for raid first,
> then it should have installed an initial ramdisk (initrd) to do this.
Well, on the kernel (2.4.3-20mdk) that I installed, it would boot
correctly
and mount the / RAID partition and the others RAID partitions correctly.
The
installed initrd.img contains the following modules :
- advansys.o (for an unused SCSI card)
- raid0.o
- raid1.o
- scsi_mod.o
- sd_mod.o
I see this by first gunzipping a copy of my initrd.img and then mounting
it as a loop device.
So the only solution that comes to my mind is that you may have some
hardware problem. Could you make a description of your hardware, please
?
> I finally fixed it by using the same floppy with
> 'rdev /dev/fd0 /dev/hda8' (/dev/hda8 being one half of my /dev/md0),
> and of course not forgetting to change the /etc/fstab accordingly.
>
> Now you try to do this all with the crippled shell you get. (it gave
> all kinds of perl errors all the time, strange..)
>
> Anyway, finally I got it to boot, and the filesystems /data2 and /home
> that I wanted to spare were still there. Good.
>
> Then I tried to get networking online, and I have a small internal
> 100Mbit network, and for internet I have an outgoing ISDN line.
> It was a major pain to get this configured, and in the end I just gave
> up and decided to install RedHat.
Which NIC(s) do you have ? It is quite hard to diagnose a problem
without
this information. If your network configuration does not work, nothing
will work afterwards.
> The drakconf tools all spoke for themselves, and I should have had a
> working network.
> However, nothing worked right:
> The nfs-server would not work at all, I wanted to use this mandrake
> computer so that my other Linux machine could mount its /home from this one.
> I tried everything, disabled or enabled bastille-linux did not make a
> difference.
Did you use ReiserFS partitions for this ? I have heard that ReiserFS
and
NFS don't mix well recently on 2.4.x kernels.
> SSH was the same. I could only ssh to the local loop, 127.0.0.1 , but
> not to localhost. From my other computer I could not ssh to the mandrake,
> could not even ping it.
Check that the openssh-server package is installed and that the server
is
started ('service sshd restart'). Could you give us the usual network
stuff :
ifconfig, netstat, arp, route, etc.
> The mandrake machine could ssh to the other however.
At least the NIC for the LAN was configured correctly, otherwise even
this
would not work.
> Something must have been wrong with the firewall but then it should have
> worked when I shut that off.
>
> Some more problems:
>
> - almost all directories in / had the wrong permissions, so that non-root
> users could not even run ls or anything else anymore.
> For instance: /usr,/bin,/usr/bin,/var,/etc etc.
> all where 'root adm rwx--x--x' .
> I had to fix that by hand.
Here I am speechless : I have the normal 'root root rwxr-xr-x' for all
the
directories that you gave and no problem whatsoever.
> - Mandrake comes with ALSA, but there was no
> clue how to actually get it working. If you ship it, there should be
> some nice configuration program for it, or better yet, that should be
> automatic.(especially for THE desktop linux)
I agree that there is no graphic tool to configure it, I have only
found alsactl, a command-line interface.
> I had to use OSS instead. I had no clue how to configure it, and when
> configured, how to actually use it, and no time to find that all out.
What is your sound card ? Here I have a PCI ForteMedia using OSS and it
was autoconfigured correctly, same for a SB PCI 128 and an AC 97
integrated
chipset.
As OSS is compiled in the Linux kernel, most of its configuration is
done
when modprobing the correct kernel module. Usually for PCI cards,
parameters are correctly auto-detected.
How to use it ? Mmmh, xmms, kmix or gmix maybe ? Or did I miss your
point ?
> I'm really disappointed that I have no time to try and fix all these
> (and some more I didn't mention) problems with Mandrake 8.0. But I had
> to get that machine up and running again, so I installed a RedHat 7.1
> instead with none of these problems.
On your installation problem, could you send me (in private) your
ddebug.log, install.log and report.bug from the root home dir (if you
still have them) so that I can try to figure out what went wrong
compared to mine ?
Another unlikely reason for your problem may be that your ISO CDs were
corrupted. Did you check the md5sum before burning them ?
Thanks for your feedback, anyway. I don't have many real tests on RAID
systems.
--
Fr�d�ric Bothamy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -- QA Team
