Adding attributes to the xCAT released tables is not a good idea.  An
upgrade would wipe out your changes and you might conflict with changes we
make in the future. You can add your own Tables and attributes.  See how in
the developers guide.
https://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/xcat/index.php?title=XCAT_Developer_Guide
  (Section 7 Adding Tables.....).

Lissa K. Valletta
2-3/T12
Poughkeepsie, NY 12601
(tie 293) 433-3102





From:   "Pocina, Goran" <[email protected]>
To:     xCAT Users Mailing list <[email protected]>
Date:   08/20/2012 11:14 AM
Subject:        Re: [xcat-user] Adding noderes.current_osimage to valid
            attributes  for     "group" and "node" objects



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]    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]>
To: xCAT Users Mailing list <[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]
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?


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