Ignoring SAN devices during kickstart?

[Brian Long]

On Tue, 2005-10-25 at 16:57 +0100, Robert McKenzie wrote:
> We have the same problem with out Dell EMC SAN.  The only way I've
> gotten around it was to disconnect the fibre from the machine being
> kicked started.  On first reboot plug it back in.  It's a headache but
> seems to be the only reliable way to get around it.

That is not scalable.  When you manage hundreds of remote servers, you
cannot get someone to walk into a locked-down data center, unplug the
SAN, etc.  We need to find a scalable way to fix this.  If there is some
magic I can include on the kernel command-line to tell it to not load
qla2300 or only load qla2300 when local storage is not found, that would
be ideal.

/Brian/
P.S. Please don't top-post.

> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
> [mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Brian Long
> Sent: 25 October 2005 16:36
> To: kickstart-list at redhat.com
> Subject: Ignoring SAN devices during kickstart?
> 
> 
> Hello,
> 
> We running into interactive kickstart issues when specifying specific
> "clearpart" and "bootloader" directives and other devices (i.e.
> /dev/sda) are read-only EMC SAN devices.  Anaconda consistently says
> "The partition table on device sda was unreadable." and asks if I want
> to initialize this drive.  Since this is the EMC Volume Logix LUN, it's
> read-only and needs to be disregarded.
> 
> What are folks doing when they re-kickstart a machine with SAN LUNs
> presented?  On our HP Proliants, I've started specifying drive order
> cciss/c0d0 so Anaconda doesn't tell GRUB to install to /dev/sda.  Any
> other tips would be appreciated.
> 
> If I have 30 LUNs presented to a machine and some of those LUNs are
> formatted with Sun labels, Anaconda asks me if I want to format them.
> I'd rather tell Anaconda to just proceed with loading to cciss/c0d0 and
> disregard these LUNs.
> 
> In our RHEL 3 customized distro, we actually removed the qla2x00 drivers
> from the boot images to avoid overwriting SAN data.  Now we're trying to
> use the untouched RHEL 4 boot images and running into all these issues.
> 
> Thanks for any help!
> 
> /Brian/
-- 
       Brian Long                      |         |           |
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