I had to upgrade a rather big cluster from Etch to Lenny this week. The old fai server was still running fai_2.8.4sarge1, but the (Etch) nfsroot had fai-client_3.1.8 installed (Lenny: 3.2.17~lenny1). Since the need to preserve several partitions always causes me headaches I would have preferred to continue using setup_harddisks but somehow the USE_SETUP_STORAGE setting slipped my attention.
I had to find that *even if I preserve_always* a certain partition at the "end" of the disk, setup-storage would complain about it (not ending at a cylinder boundary: this is a RAID on a 3ware controller which would fake geometries anyway) - I had to backup, drop the preserve_* setting, and restore after installation. Same happened to a 7TB partition (on an Areca controller) which had to be created by hand previously (leaving the minimum of 34 sectors for GPT information at the beginning and end): I had to workaround this (by not declaring the disk at all in disk_config, and using my old manual setup scripts to conditionally mkfs and add the fstab line). In addition, I noticed that the new style would make partitions on "real disks" (no geometry translation) _smaller_ than they were before, resulting in a gap: Disk /dev/sda: 164.6 GB, 164696555520 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 20023 cylinders, total 321672960 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Disk identifier: 0x39d139d0 Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 5237189 2618563+ 83 Linux /dev/sda2 5237190 7325639 1044225 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda3 7325640 9414089 1044225 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sda4 9414090 321669494 156127702+ f W95 Ext'd (LBA) /dev/sda5 9414153 11502539 1044193+ 83 Linux /dev/sda6 11502603 13590989 1044193+ 83 Linux /dev/sda7 13591053 16723664 1566306 83 Linux /dev/sda8 16820118 321669494 152424688+ 83 Linux (note the gap between sda7 and sda8 - about 96000 sectors!) The corresponding disk_config partition sizes didn't change for years: disk_config sda disklabel:msdos preserve_always:8 bootable:1 primary / 2560 ext3 rw,errors=remount-ro createopts="-m1" primary swap 1024 swap rw primary swap 1024 swap rw logical /tmp 1024 ext3 rw,nosuid createopts="-m0" logical /var 1024 ext3 rw createopts="-m1" logical /opt 1536 ext3 rw createopts="-m1" logical /scratch 1- xfs rw Apparently the rounding strategy has changed... intentionally? Cheers, Steffen -- Steffen Grunewald * MPI Grav.Phys.(AEI) * Am Mühlenberg 1, D-14476 Potsdam Cluster Admin * http://pandora.aei.mpg.de/merlin/ * http://www.aei.mpg.de/ * e-mail: steffen.grunewald(*)aei.mpg.de * +49-331-567-{fon:7233,fax:7298} No Word/PPT mails - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
