Hi, Just to clarify that I didn't attempt to rebuild the three stateless images, only to use them as is. So I probably don't need to worry about choosing partimage or partimage-ng.
I still stuck at 'Unable to identify plugin for this command, check relevant tables: nodetype.os', any help/hint/suggestion is appreciated. Thanks, John Ma Marist College From: John Ma <john...@marist.edu> To: vcl-user@incubator.apache.org Date: 03/22/2011 03:55 PM Subject: Re: VCL2.2 + xCAT2.5 on bladecenter Josh, Thank you for the detailed instruction, I gave it a try to setup xCAT2.5/imaging by following https://cwiki.apache.org/VCL/adding-support-for-partimage-and-partimage-ng-to-xcat-2x-unofficial.html . I cannot find partimage-ng anywhere, so I have partimage-0.6.9 compiled and installed, but it doesn't seem working. I got: [root@blade14 ~]# nodeset blade08 image blade08: Error: Unable to identify plugin for this command, check relevant tables: nodetype.os I have to handcraft several xcat tables, among them nodetype and osimage are the ones I have little confidence. Could you dump some relevant records in those two tables to illustrate your setup? also, do I need to change anything to switch from partimage-ng to partimage? Thanks, John Ma Marist College Poughkeepsie, NY From: Josh Thompson <josh_thomp...@ncsu.edu> To: vcl-user@incubator.apache.org Date: 03/22/2011 12:15 PM Subject: Re: VCL2.2 + xCAT2.5 on bladecenter -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 John, The stateless parts are not actually black boxes. They are gziped cpio files and are typical linux initrd and root filesystem images. You can do the following to extract them: mkdir /tmp/stateless cd /tmp/stateless mkdir initrd mkdir rootimg wget http://people.apache.org/~jfthomps/partimageng_xCAT2x/initrd.img wget http://people.apache.org/~jfthomps/partimageng_xCAT2x/rootimg.gz cd initrd zcat ../initrd.img | cpio --extract cd ../rootimg zcat ../rootimg.gz | cpio --extract # if you do this last command as a non- root user, you will get one error about not being able to create dev/null which is okay to ignore unless you want to modify and recreate the image You would actually need to go through this process if you have hardware that is not supported in these images. I only had the hardware at NCSU to develop on; so, they don't have a very big range of hardware support. If you decide to go ahead with using this stuff for partimage and need support for different hardware, I can guide you through adding it in to initrd and rootimg. If you wanted to modify and recreate the images after doing the above, you would do the following: cd /tmp/stateless/initrd find . | cpio -oc | gzip -c -9 > ../initrd-new.img cd /tmp/stateless/rootimg find . | cpio -oc | gzip -c -9 > ../rootimg-new.gz The two images really don't do much. Most of the work is done by the partimageng postscript. They really just provide a small install of linux on which the other stuff can run. As long as NCSU is using bare metal images, we'll still need a way to use xCAT and partimage to deploy images, and I don't see us moving completely away from bare metal images for many years. I have been told that more recent versions of xCAT 2 do have partimage support, but that you have to download that part separately. I have not looked in to this, but if it would be easy to switch VCL over to using that, it's possible we may do so in the future. Josh On Tuesday March 22, 2011, John Ma wrote: > My concerns to the pre-build images are > 1. Security - It's a black box. Will need our security officer's > approval for production use. > 2. Support - Will it still be available when we need to expand to other > hardware platform or next release of xCAT/partimage? > > John Ma > Marist College > > > > > From: Aaron Peeler <aaron_pee...@ncsu.edu> > To: vcl-user@incubator.apache.org > Date: 03/22/2011 10:32 AM > Subject: Re: VCL2.2 + xCAT2.5 on bladecenter > > > > We like partimage-ng. > > But, we still use both partimage and partimage-ng. Our case is a little > unique, we started using xCAT1.3 with partimage, then added local > support ourselves because xcat 2.0 did not include imaging. > > Can you expand on what you feel uncomfortable about? Is it building them > or modifying, you should be able to mount them and view the contents. > > Aaron > > On 3/21/11 1:53 PM, John Ma wrote: > > Hi Aaron, > > > > I couldn't even finish configuring xCAT2.5 to capture image. What > > imaging module is in your setup, partimage, partimage-ng, systemimager > > or other? I have this resource > > https://cwiki.apache.org/VCL/adding-support-for-partimage-and-partimage-ng- > to-xcat-2x-unofficial.html , > > > but feel uncomfortable with the three pre-build stateless images. > > > > Thanks, > > John Ma > > Marist College > > > > > > > > > > From: Aaron Peeler <aaron_pee...@ncsu.edu> > > To: vcl-user@incubator.apache.org > > Date: 03/21/2011 12:33 PM > > Subject: Re: VCL2.2 + xCAT2.5 on bladecenter > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > > > > > > > Hello John, > > > > Yes. We're using xcat 2.5.1 and older versions > > > > Can you send your vcld.log file for the requestid it failed on? > > > > Aaron > > > > On 3/21/11 12:25 PM, John Ma wrote: > > > Hi community, > > > > > > I attempted and failed to setup xCAT 2.5 to work with VCL2.2 for bare > > > metal provisioning all within a bladecenter. Does anyone have a > > success > > > > story on this kind of setup yet? > > > > > > Thanks, > > > John Ma > > > Marist College > > > > -- > > Aaron Peeler > > Program Manager > > Virtual Computing Lab > > NC State University - -- - ------------------------------- Josh Thompson VCL Developer North Carolina State University my GPG/PGP key can be found at pgp.mit.edu -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.16 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAk2IyvUACgkQV/LQcNdtPQMBgwCaApLT9Tla8NEwBDZNbJXSE3DN usYAn388FMgQRiSCmFqei9cCEKWIAfqk =Tv6U -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
