Hi Christian, take a look at Document ID: 207612 Old Document ID: (formerly 88656) Title: Labels for SAN attached disks can be overwritten by jumpstart of a Solaris[TM] x86 host and CR 6528699 missing fdisk keyword in jumpstart profile for x86 defaults to fdisk all solaris maxfree (some snippets below)
Description A custom jumpstart install of x86 systems which are attached to a SAN can overwrite the labels of SAN LUNS if the fdisk keyword is missing from the custom jumpstart profile used to install the x86 client. According to the documentation, if the fdisk keyword is not specified in a profile, the following is used by default during the installation. fdisk all solaris maxfree Since the SAN disks are now seen in jumpstart miniroot, they are "seen" by the installer and if no fdisk keyword is specified in the profile which provides the desired fdisk target - then ALL the visible SAN disks/LUNs are fdisk'd - thereby destroying the existing labels and replacing with a Solaris VTOC. While this default behavior of "fdisk all solaris maxfree" might have have a good idea at some point, it is no longer a good idea when the consequences of a missing profile keyword can have such disasterous results for attached SAN storage. See Solaris 10 11/06 Installation Guide: Custom JumpStart and Advanced Installations at http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-6397/6n8dpr9ff?q=probe&a=view <http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-6397/6n8dpr9ff?q=probe&a=view> >From the section entitled: x86: fdisk Profile Keyword --snip-- ------------------------------------------------------------------ fdisk disk_name type size ------------------------------------------------------------------ fdisk defines how the fdisk partitions are set up on an x86 based system. You can specify fdisk more than once. When fdisk partitions an x86 based system, the following occurs: * All fdisk partitions on the disk are preserved unless you delete the partitions with the fdisk keyword by assigning size the value of delete or 0. Also, all existing fdisk partitions are deleted when size is set to all. * A Solaris fdisk partition that contains a root (/) file system is always designated as the active partition on the disk. _______________________________________________________________ Note -- The system boots from the active partition by default. _______________________________________________________________ * If the fdisk keyword is not specified in a profile, the following fdisk keyword is used by default during the installation. fdisk all solaris maxfree * fdisk entries are processed in the order in which the entries are listed in the profile. --/snip-- Relief/Workaround * (Best) make sure all hosts going through an installation are detached from the SAN environment * Include the fdisk statement in the jumpstart profile indicating which luns are appropriate to label. janet Christian Schmidt wrote: > Hi, > > we had a problem with a jumstart installation in our storage cluster > environment. In this cluster are many sparc and x86 server, all are > connected to a RAID System. And all server see all luns. > > A few days ago we added a new x86 Server and performed a jumpstart > installation with following profile: > > install_type initial_install > root_device c1d0s0 > system_type standalone > partitioning explicit > cluster SUNWCXall > filesys c1d0s0 existing / > filesys c1d0s1 existing swap > filesys c1d0s7 existing /export/home preserve > locale en_US.ISO8859-15 > geo N_America > geo W_Europe > geo S_Europe > geo C_Europe > > After the installation all Servers in the cluster had troubles with > their SAN devices. The reason for the trouble was, that the jumpstart > installation labeled all devices, which are attached to the server, with > a sunIA32 label. So all of our SAN disks become unusable for the other > x86 and Sparc server. > > Why does the installation label all devices? They are not specified in > the filesys statement and their is no fdisk statement in the profile > file. > > We had to restore manually all disk labels for 40 disks. > > I think that this behavior of x86 jumpstart is a bug. > > Christian. > -- > This message posted from opensolaris.org > _______________________________________________ > install-discuss mailing list > install-discuss at opensolaris.org > http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/install-discuss > -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/install-discuss/attachments/20080908/ce80de70/attachment.html>
