RE: [Sisuite-users] Problem with autoinstalling Centos4.2 on Dell 450

[Bernard Li]

Title: RE: [Sisuite-users] Problem with autoinstalling Centos4.2 on Dell 450

Hi Paul:

You need to modify your kernel append option with a larger RAMDISK_SIZE (I usually use 70,000).  Hopefully that should work.

Just out of curiosity, are these nodes being used for rendering?

Cheers,

Bernard


-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Paul Newman
Sent: Thu 09/03/2006 16:07
To: sisuite-users@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: [Sisuite-users] Problem with autoinstalling Centos4.2 on Dell 450

Hello.

I am unable to use SI 3.6.3 to autoinstall a CentOS4.2 (RHEL4 clone)
image  on our Dell 450 desktop computers.

I have been using SI to clone our rackmount systems (Dell 1750s) for the
last few months. (I've succedded in installing CentOS4.2 and RH8 with
the old SI 3.0.1 release, in upgrading and downgrading from the
installed SCSI hard disks.) I've only just started to try to use the
system with desktop systems.


This is what I've done so far:

1) created a golden image of a CentOS4.2 machine with si_prepareclient.

2) uploaded it to the server with si_getimage.

3) created a boot cd with si_mkautoinstallcd. This version of
Systemimager allowed me to choose between creating a "standard" cd or
one based on the image I uploaded in step 2. I used the
non-standard/uploaded image choice.

4) Created a non-bootable diskette with a local.cfg disk which specified
the hostname, IP and image name to install.

5) Attempted to boot a target system with the cd and floppy in the
appropriate drives.

The system started the boot process, but panic'd before mounting the
root ramdisk. Below are the messages up to and including the panic.

I understand that this version is not stable but installed it after
seeing several mailing list messages advising that it was the only
version available which would support CentOS4/RHEL4 systems.


RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
input: AT Translated Set 2 keyboard on isa0060/serio0
RAMDISK: incomplete write (-28 != 32768) 16777216
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
freeing unused kernel memory: 224k freed
attempt to access beyond end of device
ram0: rw=0, want=52058, limit=32768
attempt to access beyond end of device
ram0: rw=0, want=52058, limit=32768
attempt to access beyond end of device
ram0: rw=0, want=52058, limit=32768
attempt to access beyond end of device
ram0: rw=0, want=65544, limit=32768
EXT2-fs error (device ram0): ext2_get_inode: unable to read inode block
- inode=513, block=32771
Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found.  Try passing init= option ot
kernel.

I also tried booting a cd built from the standard choice in
si_mkautoinstallcd. That also failed but at a different place. after
booting onto the ramdisk, the CD boot session created the partitions (1
is /boot, 2 and 3 are swap and 4 is /) ran mke2fs on the first (/boot)
partition (which seemed to run ok), but failed on the mount command. It
seems like parted and mke2fs could find the drive ok but mount could not.

I should mention that none of our systems use RAID or LVM, and all
drives are mounted with specified device files and not with labels.

Otherwise I find systemimager to be an awesome product with great
potential. I will try to find some time to contribute to the
documentation effort. for example, I found no docs on the various
version differences, particularly which versions support which hardware.


Thanks for supporting this interesting tool box.


p


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