[et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler + %pre and %post in kickstart

[Mike M]

On 8/2/07, Michael DeHaan <mdehaan at redhat.com> wrote:
> In theory, it should be possible to (a) retrieve the OEM command line
> tool in %pre (wget?) and configure hardware RAID with it there (in
> %pre), so you wouldn't have to rebuild the initrd just to add the raid
> tools.  Either way, after running the RAID tool in %pre you will
> probably have to do something like scsi-add-single to get Anaconda to
> see the new drives prior to partitioning setup.

Unfortunately, this is exactly how we do it now, and it's a mess.  In
almost all cases, it's just easier to manually configure the RAID
array than to deal with extracting drivers from cpio archives, making
linux re-discover the disk changes, etc.  As you mention, there's a
lot of debugging that has to happen, and not just the first time.
Basically, every time Dell changes it's RAID controller (SCSI to SAS
was especially painful), or we decide to kickstart a different Red Hat
Version or Update level, it causes problems.

I was hoping for some trick up Cobbler's sleeve that would make it
easier, but it seems like that's just wishful thinking on my part...

Thanks anyway for the responses!

Mike