Nathan Milford asks: > Anyone ever find a way to configure PERC from a Kickstart script? > Yes, and it is possible, but with limitations.
Stephen Dowdy replied: > I've got a SUSE SLES10 deployment DVD (and USB key) ... > > I do that before the AutoYast autoconfiguration instead of during it I'm not familiar enough with the SuSE installation process to say with complete confidence, but it certainly sounds like it uses AutoYast as an alternative/replacement for Anaconda/Kickstart. My experience is only with the latter, and some of the issues (anaconda limitations) probably don't apply in that case. However, they would apply for any RHEL, CentOS, and probably even Fedora. > What you have to worry about if you do make PERC mods live, > is forcing the system to reprobe the SCSI bus. Take a look > at rescan_scsi_bus (http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/) for > a simple helper (you may need to alter defaults to scan > more buses/adapters/luns). If you've booted with a PERC > with 4 VD's configured and you re-configure it with 6 VDs, > you may have to do some work to figure out which new scsi > blkdevices are correct. > This is quite true. Our %pre scripts just `echo add-single-device 0 2 $scsi_id 0 > /proc/scsi/scsi` to (re)create the additional devices (we `echo "scsi remove-single-device 0 2 $scsi_id 0 > /proc/scsi/scsi` to remove unneeded ones) which is more or less the heart of what the rescan_scsi_bus script does (although that script seems to handle a lot more kernel revisions and stuff, and is well worth checking out). In the anaconda installation environment, I'm not sure udev is running, so you may also need to mknod any /dev/sd[a-z] devices that you need (anaconda will take care of the partition devices if needed). You'll also need to make MegaCli available to do the actual reconfiguration of your PERC drive - you can (re)generate your own ISO with the MegaCli executable or use a USB thumb drive or NFS mount if you are PXE booting. However, there is an anaconda limitation (at least with 11.1.2.195 in RHEL 5.4 and earlier) where it scans the hard drives and builds a map of the available devices for installation (isys.py driveDict) before invoking the %pre script and never rescans afterwards. So although you can (re)configure your PERC RAID devices, if your kickstart disk configuration references any drives that didn't already exist before the %pre script ran, anaconda will abort, claiming that the kickstart configuration uses a non-existent drive. If you're using a USB thumb drive this will complicate things, as it shows up as a "SCSI" device as well (and this brings up the block device reordering issues Stephen refers to as well). Dell systems with PERC RAID ship with one or two RAID devices pre-configured (depending on the number of physical drives and the RAID type) so as long as your kickstart installation only needs to use the same number of virtual drives, you should be okay. But if you have an eight-drive server and you want to set that up as RAID-1 [2] + RAID-5 [3] + RAID-5 [3] and then put /usr on the third virtual drive, you will need to modify/fix anaconda. @alex -- mailto:[email protected] _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list [email protected] https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
