Hello, I inherited an xCat (2.16.4?) deployment environment that I’m now trying to understand. The deployment/management server is CentOS, but the clients are Ubuntu 18.04.
We recently got some new Lenovo servers and I had to figure out how to image them. The servers came with Intel VROC (7.5 AFAICT) enabled, with a two-disk mirror “Volume0” and a four-disk RAID5 “Volume1” pre-configured. After getting the hardware added to xCat / Confluent and running “rinstall hostname”, the system ran through the Ubuntu installation… but installed the OS on the RAID5 volume. This is not what we wanted: we want the OS on the mirror/RAID1. I tweaked the “partitionfile=…,d:…” file to use value of “Volume0” instead of “md126” in case there is/was VROC-mdadm mapping issue, but then the installer complained about not being able to find the root disk. After some digging, it turns out that newer Intel VROC [1] releases only officially support [2][3] Ubuntu 18.04.x, where x>2, and our installation image just happens to be .2. So I downloaded .6 (and .4) and used copycds to pull that into xCat, and used chdef to alter “osvers=ubuntu18.04.6” and “pkgdir=/install/ubuntu18.04.6/x86_64” (where previously it was .2). The newer Ubuntu releases/ISOs appear to use 5.x Linux kernels, while the .2 PXE boots 4.18. Installation onto the mirrored, now-detected Volume0 occurred, but now the system won’t boot because the installer installs the “grub-pc” package instead of the “grub-efi-amd64” package (and dependencies like efibootmgr). Has anyone seen this kind of behaviour before? Is there way to trace how “rinstall” generates the various files differently (?) depending on “osvers” and/or “pkdir”? Or where logs on ‘BIOS mode’ or package selection is determined in the boot or installation process? Thanks for any info. [1] https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/software/virtual-raid-on-cpu-vroc.html [2] https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/support/articles/000030310/ [3] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000056229/ _______________________________________________ xCAT-user mailing list xCAT-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xcat-user
