On Wed, 9 Jul 2008, Jay Turner wrote:
Anyway, I would like to take this opportunity to offer a side trip with
this thread. What do people need/want in RHEL6?
1. I would love to have Anaconda be more verbose about why it failed to
download a kickstart file. And even provide information wrt. all its
interfaces, links, mac addresses, pci-slot and driver name.
How hard is it to tell us whether the interface had no link, it could not
find its gateway, or the webserver, or there was a HTTP error.
At several large companies with a layered network and complex VLANs, where
PC hardware always is slightly different, it is hell to know for sure
which interface is the one needed to download the kickstart file and you
need a reboot (BIOSes are still fairly slow) to test another one. Most of
these systems have 6 to 8 NICs and the problem could be patching or switch
configuration related. Anaconda happily tries to download kickstart files
from interfaces that have no link. The asknetwork option does give you the
NIC vendor, but not which one have a link and no MAC address or
PCI slot information. And you cannot go back when you have selected the
wrong interface.
So the burden is on the people that need to load these systems (usually
operations or room-management) and falls back on someone being able to
troubleshoot on a case-by-case basis.
Booting a RHEL rescue to find the order of the NICs is useless because it
lacks ethtool and mii-tool. Booting another recovery disc causes the
driver order to be different anyway. So we have to write down
mac-addresses and type them at the boot-prompt. The workflow simply sucks.
And no, PXE/DHCP is not allowed in some environments. I wish it were.
2. A way to blacklist kernel drivers would be very useful. If possible a
way to blacklist them at the kernel level so they cannot be loaded (or if
compiled-in are disabled forever).
This would help us to disable SAN drivers from loading (and helps
preventing accidental wipes of SAN storage on /dev/sda). It would be
equally useful in case where you know what NICs are onboard for certain
hardware so they are loaded first. (And not arbitrarily as is now, first
e1000, then tg3, then bnx2 ?)
The same feature would also be very useful if some driver causes hardware
problems during boot to at least kick off the installation without the
defect driver delying or preventing the installation.
3. It would be even more helpful if drivers were loaded based on the order
of the PCI busses. So that onboard devices are loaded before add-on
devices. This would at least give us a more predictable behaviour.
4. Adding ethtool and mii-tool on the rescue image would be helpful as
well.
5. A shell or python-prompt before the kickstart-file is loaded would help
debugging network issues as well.
And here I conclude my Anaconda-related wishlist :)
--
-- dag wieers, [EMAIL PROTECTED], http://dag.wieers.com/ --
[Any errors in spelling, tact or fact are transmission errors]
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