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On 11/28/11 22:26 PM, Gerhardus Geldenhuis wrote:
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Hi
<div>I am building Red Hat 5.4 and 5.5 boxes on VMWare and some on
HP blades with SAN attached storage. I need to do
partition alignment during build which I understand is done
automatically in Red Hat 6's version of anaconda and later but
not yet in 5.4, 5.5. So a number of questions:</div>
<div>* I could not find an option for part in the docs (<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart#part_or_partition">http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart#part_or_partition</a>)
that easily allow me to set a sector offset. I have found a
number of ways to do this but was wondering if there is an
hidden option to do this using part. Currently I am using fdisk
to create a partition starting at sector 64 rather than 63 for
SAN storage and doing the same for VMWare boxes. <br>
</div>
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<br>
I *thought* (check with VMware) that after Vsphere 3 you wouldn't
need to align the partitions any more--but the last time I checked
was in 2009, so I could be seriously wrong. Or you could be running
V3, in which case...<br>
<br>
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<div>* How can I easily debug my kickstart? I currently change the
kickstart and then reboot the physical server but that is
very painful as it has to go through all of the bios checks etc
and then sometime I forget to press F12... I tried adding a
sleep 100000 to my pre scripts which works and allows me to run
some commands on the command line but I am not sure how to
"reparse" the kickstart file to test whether new settings works.</div>
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<br>
I usually use VMware Workstation/Player to debug my kickstart
scripts, with lots of redirecting to different log files. This lets
me sit in my somewhat comfy chair in a slightly quieter machine room
(my desk is on a raised floor, but most of the servers are in the
other room) and watch the installs while I do other things. Then
when I've got it mostly right I run it on the real hardware, which
would (eventually) be a known transform. <br>
<br>
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<div>* Also rather than use clever ways of getting a list of
drives or anything similar... is there predefined
procedures/variables that I can use, are they available in all
scripting languages (bash, python) and where/how could I easily
get a list of available variables for scripting.</div>
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I suspect if there was a clever call for it in kickstart that
underneath it would use a "clever" way and be not so portable to new
hardware. This is actually a more difficult problem than you'd think
at first, what with iSCSI, FCOE, SCSI, SATA, IDE, whatever HP does
to get /dev/cciss/c0d0 stuff etc. <br>
<br>
Would be nice though. <br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
Petro.<br>
L@b R@t. <br>
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