I'm building a cluster where the nodes will boot using PXE, but they have disks on them which will be used for things like scratch space, swap, crash dumps, etc. Once of the issues I'm facing is that I'd like to be able to detect if the disks have been partioned to the latest standard on boot and rebuild them if they haven't. I'd like this to be able to work with Linux if necessicary, but for now the systems will run FreeBSD.
What I'd been thinking was that I could write a magic string over the beginning of the MBR since I'm never going to try and boot these disks. That would let me detect uninitalized drives as well as out of date partitioning schemes. Are there any problems to look out for with this solution? Does anyone know of a better one? Thanks, Brooks -- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE. PGP fingerprint 655D 519C 26A7 82E7 2529 9BF0 5D8E 8BE9 F238 1AD4
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