First things first - I now have ALL my systems successfully imaged. Many thanks to Andrea for all his patience with me and my odd configurations. It turns out most of the problems were related to a combination of hardware and configuration problems, some of which I think SI could have dealt with by more extensive error handling and others perhaps through more documentation. I have more thoughts on docs that I'll get to shortly.
As for the hardware, it looks like I have a bad slot in my scsi chassis. As you may (or may not) recall, I was getting errors on /dev/sdb which was causing major problems. Removing sdb from the install script didn't help nor did physically removing the drive! It wasn't until I removed BOTH sdb and sdc that the controller convinced itself to stop its scan at sda and changed my autoinstallscript.conf to only configure 1 disk so SI wouldn't try to partition more than 1 disk that things worked. I don't really think SI could have done much about this in code, but \better documentation to describe how the whole configuration process works might have helped. Another problem I had was a system I imaged had a disk with only 1 partition and it wasn't the first one! As a result prepareclient built an invalid configuration, trying to create 3 partitions in the master installation script. This is something I do believe can be handled in software and Andrea has added such a check to his todo list. 8-) Still something else I saw, but am not entirely sure any more where it came from, I have seen instances where parted reported a geometry of "0 - 0 MB" and caused the install script to try and execute invalid parted commands. Someone I spoke with thought this could be caused by bad hardware. Again, SI should have a special test for this and if seen, at tell the user and/or igore it. Don't generate an invalid installation script. I've also seen issues with floppy errors on systems with no floppies. There really isn't anything SI can do about it but perhaps a warning in the output to ignore these messages would help ease people's minds. There are still a couple of messages that I think are harmless but look like error messages. I've already reported a number of these and I know people had said they intend to clean them up. Consider this a friendly reminder 8-) Now to the documentation - and let me say I am willing to help write up some things if someone will tell me the preferred format... I had to go back and convince myself there is no Troubleshooting Section and there should be! There are some tips buried in the FAQ section, but I really think the two should be separate. That said, I have some suggested sections for Troubleshooting: - One needs a clear description of the entire boot/installation/configuration process, with sections talking about things like getting an intial address and what can happen if dhcp is not running or dhcpd.conf is misconfigured, running tftp to get the kernel/initrd (and to watch out for the architecture), pulling down boel and what to do if it can't be found, getting the master script and describing the steps it goes through including describing what SystemConfigurator does. - How to debug an installation script. I tend to insert exit and echo statements and try executing commands manually, but I really don't have any idea if there is a better way or not. - How configure an image built for one disk configuration to work with a different one. Maybe this is really a FAQ? - How to modify autoinstallscript.conf. Maybe this too is a FAQ and part of the previous one. - How to remotely monitor a system. btw - I can't get this to work with the standard software but can with my own listener running on the image server so I at least know the client is sending messages back to the Image Server. - How to debug systemconfigurator problems by running it manually. Also don't forget to describe --verbose - How to tell if a boot record was really written by using the hexdump command. - How to generate output on the client and use rsync to copy it back to the image server - Special considerations for Grub 0.93? Maybe a FAQ? That's about it for now, but I also think once you have the start of a troubleshooting section you might get more people to contribute to it. -mark ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys -- and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Sisuite-devel mailing list Sisuite-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/sisuite-devel
