Fedora 7 kickstart problem with rebuilt Everything image

[Howard Wilkinson]

We routinely rebuild systems from a kickstart driven facility we have 
built. This uses a Fedora image - in this case fedora 7 Everything with 
the updates merged in. We have run into 2 problems with this as opposed 
to the original release image.

First the version of yum available in updates currently is incompatible 
with the version of anaconda. The problem is that this version of yum 
does not create the headers directory and anaconda assumes it will exist.

    anaconda-11.2.0.66-1.i386.rpm
    yum-3.2.1-1.fc7

To get round this we have reverted to yum-3.2.0-1.fc7.noarch.rpm for now 
but will probably try out the development releases of anaconda and yum 
next week.

More worrying is a problem with dependencies in building the kernel 
initrd images. The newly built Everything regime has the latest kernel - 
kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7 - as available from updates. But when the 
kickstart install runs the mkinitrd cannot find /sbin/mdadm as the mdadm 
package is not a dependency of the kernel (and should not be for all 
builds but ....[1]) This has the effect of allowing the build to 
complete but when the system reboots LVM cannot find the logical volume 
groups because the raid has not started.

    /We build our systems with mirrored boot partitions on /dev/md0 and
    mirrored /dev/md1 on the remainder of the disc with logical volumes
    on this portion of the disc including the root partition. Hence the
    problem above.[1]/

To get round this we are rebuilding the kernel to require the mdadm 
package - but this is really not what we should be doing. Somewhere in 
the RPM, YUM, Anaconda, regime we need to be able to specify that mdadm 
(and lvm2) needs to be installed prior to the kernel installation, only 
for our particular configurations not in general. Any ideas anybody?

-- 

Howard Wilkinson

	

Phone:

	

+44(20)76907075

Coherent Technology Limited

	

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23 Northampton Square,

	

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+44(7980)639379

United Kingdom, EC1V 0HL

	

Email:

	

howard at cohtech.com

 

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