Thanks! noderes.comments works. Re: Feedback on partitioning approach.
I’m new to xCAT, so please take this commentary with a grain of salt as I likely don’t understand enough to comment usefully. It’s easy to imagine that different node profiles may need a different partitioning schemes, for example: WSs, Servers, Compute nodes, KVM hosts, could all require different partitioning. The proposed solution puts partitioning include file into the osimage table, which appears to be indexed on “profile”. This is the same scope as hard coding partitioning information into the Kickstart file, which is what we do today, so it makes sense. I believe that in this scheme, each “profile” supports one, and only one, partitioning scheme, no? This wouldn’t help with my WS example, where a single osimage needs to be installed on different disk configurations, and so would require multiple partitioning schemes. To support that, the nodehm or noderes tables would be a better fit for the partitioning file. Deciding on the scope is a tough problem. I’m not sure I know what the answer is. I suspect I’ll set a variable like $PART-INC-FILE in noderes.comments, but that will mean I’ll need some other attribute to hold my “SW repo version” information, because those two variables have different scope. It might be nice if there were a bunch of unused user attributes in both node and profile scoped tables, that users could adapt as they wished for their environments. For example: noderes.usrfld1, noderes.usrfld2, noderes.usrfld3, … osimage.usrfld1, osimage.usrfld2, osimage.usrfld3, … . . . It, it looks like “nodetype” table bridges the gap between node centric and profile centric data, but I’m not too clear on how precedence is determined in all cases. Thanks, Goran From: Bruce M Potter [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, August 20, 2012 8:59 AM To: xCAT Users Mailing list Subject: Re: [xcat-user] Adding noderes.current_osimage to valid attributes for "group" and "node" objects We are almost done adding custom disk partitioning support to the development version (trunk) of xcat. See https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/xcat/index.php?title=Specify_the_disk_partitions_during_diskfull_install . (Feedback on the design is welcome.) About the current_osimage attribute, the reason we haven't added that attribute to the node or group object (it's currently only defined in the noderes table directly), is because we haven't nailed down the exact definition of the attribute yet or exactly what the value should be. The idea of the attribute is to be able to tell what os image the node is currently running, even if you have already changed provmethod in prep for updating the nodes in the next few days. Probably it should be an osimage definition name, but should we also support the older style nodetype.os values (e.g. rhels6.2)? But your proposed use of current_osimage seems to be different than this, so you would run into trouble when we implement our support for it. (Not sure when that will be.) You might be better off putting your info in a comments attribute, like nodetype.comments or noderes.comments. You can still set that at the group level using something like "tabch node=testnodes noderes.comments=hithere". (I would suggest using nodegrpch, but it seems to be broken right now.) And you can use it in the template using the syntax: #TABLE:noderes:$NODE:comments# Bruce Potter STSM, Linux & AIX Cluster Development, IBM, Poughkeepsie, NY Email: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Phone: external: 845-433-7073, internal: TL 293-7073 [Inactive hide details for "Pocina, Goran" ---08/20/2012 07:38:28 AM---A 2nd objective would be to allow disk partitioning to be]"Pocina, Goran" ---08/20/2012 07:38:28 AM---A 2nd objective would be to allow disk partitioning to be specified as a variable associated with a From: "Pocina, Goran" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> To: xCAT Users Mailing list <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, Date: 08/20/2012 07:38 AM Subject: Re: [xcat-user] Adding noderes.current_osimage to valid attributes for "group" and "node" objects ________________________________ A 2nd objective would be to allow disk partitioning to be specified as a variable associated with a node group, and not hard coded into the kickstart template. Kickstart could select the appropriate partitioning include file, based on the value of this variable. Ideally we’d be able to use the same kickstart file with nodes with different disk configurations, and then use a separate “partitioning-specifc” node group to specify the partitioning variable. There might be different partitioning schemes for WSs with 1, 2, 4 disks, etc, if the disk partitioning could be specified independently of the “ws” node profile, only one Kickstart template would be needed. Otherwise each combination of “node type” and “disk configuration” requires a separate profile/kickstart template, which would be more difficult to maintain. BTW: Here’s the error that’s displayed when current_osimage is assigned a value: [root@drdkvm0003 dump1]# chdef -t group -o cm-0.0 noderes.current_osimage="repo-c6desres repo-anton-v2" Error: 'noderes.current_osimage' is not a valid attribute name for for an object type of 'group'. Error: Skipping to the next attribute. Error: One or more errors occured when attempting to create or modify xCAT object definitions. Thanks, Goran From: Pocina, Goran Sent: Friday, August 17, 2012 10:56 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: [xcat-user] Adding noderes.current_osimage to valid attributes for "group" and "node" objects Is it possible for users to add existing DB attributes to the list of valid attributes for the “group” or “node” objects? For example, noderes.current_osimage and noderes.next_osimage are defined in the schema, and described by the “noderes” man page as “not currently used”. We’d like to use one of these fields to pass as a variable to the Kickstart template (by also adding it in the site table), so the kickstart file can determine at install time which version of a repo to use for the install. We maintain our in-house software in a separate repos from which frequent snapshots are taken. These snapshots are accessible by the MN http server. The ultimate goal is to be able to switch a node from one version of the software, to another, by only changing its node group, and, to avoid having to maintain a separate Kickstart template and profile for each unique version of software. Is this possible? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/_______________________________________________ xCAT-user mailing list [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcat-user
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