[Sisuite-users] What I did was ugly, but it is working

[Greg Hartzog]

Hello there everyone.  I got everything working, but what I did was an ugly hack.  Let me give some background about what I trying to accomplish and how I made it work.   Then I would love some suggestions on a more elegant way of doing this.

I am setting up an IBM BladeCenter.  It has 6 HS20 blades, each SAN booting from an IBM DS4000 disk array.  The blades are all running RHEL 3 Update 5.

Getting the first blade loaded by hand and making a golden client from it was pretty simple.  Get the other blades to network boot via BOEL was more challenging.

I need to get 3 things added in to BOEL.  The Qlogic HBA driver.  The multipath driver for IBM DS4000, referred to as RDAC.  And the newest Broadcom NIC driver.  Each of these comes as a separate tarball to compile a binary module.  None of them come as kernel patches.

What I ended up doing is as follows.

I compiled all the 3 tarballs and put all the new kernel module files into INITRD_SOURCE/MY_MODULES.

I edited INITRD_SOURCE/SKEL/ETC/INIT.D/FUNCTIONS to make INSMOD calls in the section hardware autodetect section.  I inserted the Qlogic modules, the RDAC modules, and various SCSI modules.

I editing INITRD_SOURCE/MY_MODULES/INSMOD_COMMANDS to insert the Broadcomm NIC module.

I edited PATCHES/LINUX.I386.CONFIG to compile the SCSI SG driver as a module, which is required by RDAC and to compile TG3 as a module rather then in the kernel directly.

After I did all that, I made and installed the binaries, and it all works like a champ.

But I think that hardcoding the various modules is a very crude of way doing this.

I would love to talk with someone about what different ways this might be done.  Then I can see about modifying what ever files need changing to implement the more general solution.

Thanks folks, and I look forward to working with everyone to find and implement the elegant version of my ugly hack.

============================================
Greg Hartzog
Storage Engineer

(678) 969-1490 (DID)
(877) 848-6784 Ext 2533 (Toll Free)
(678) 969-1491 (fax)
(678) 575-7616 (mobile)

[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Optimus Solutions
22 Technology Parkway
Norcross, Georgia  30092

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