the driverdisk option in the .cfg file

[Leonhardt, Rick]

Hi,,
I kinda jumped off of the group for a "personal" question.
I'm using Dell 2950's which have a BroadComm nic.
Dell says use Open Manage (which is not an option for me)
When I did this manually (CD ISO's) the software from Dell actually did a
kernel re-compile!!
Any ideas?
thanks
Rick Leonhardt
Belo Interactive
System Admin
214 977 4815 

-----Original Message-----
From: Shabazian, Chip [mailto:Chip.Shabazian at bankofamerica.com] 
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2007 2:52 PM
To: Discussion list about Kickstart
Subject: RE: the driverdisk option in the .cfg file

Actually, you can access the driver over the network if the NIC
successfully PXEBoots.  Either add it to the initrd that gets loaded, or
load it via the commandline.

I ran into a situation where we needed to do this a long time ago, but
we couldn't change the update level that we were building from.  The
easiest solution was to bust open the initrd, and swap out loader from a
more recent initrd that had the driver.

As for the online documentation, to say that it is basic is a kind
statement.  I'm hoping to create a much more technical brief on
kickstart over the next few months, if time permits.  Along those lines,
I'll be asking people to send me their tips/tricks that they have
learned over the years.

Chip 

-----Original Message-----
From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Ray Van Dolson
Sent: Thursday, January 11, 2007 12:45 PM
To: Discussion list about Kickstart
Subject: Re: the driverdisk option in the .cfg file

On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 01:42:28PM -0700, Harner Keith-FKH006 wrote:
>  
> Sure,
> 
> I get:
> *ASSERT: no network device in choosenetworkinterface *Unable to bring 
> up network
> 
> So even though the host will PXE load a kernel it still cannot get to 
> a network resource?

Oooh.  Well, looks like there is no built-in driver support for your
network cards. :)  You'll need a driver disk for that as well likely.
You may need to modify your installation CD in order to include this
driver as there's no way to access it across the network without the
NIC's working :D

That or actually provide a physical driver disk, but that kind of
negates the benefits of a hands-off Kickstart install.

> My goal is to eliminate the need for a driver disk at boot time as we 
> run XCat and routinely have users reboot to upgrade their
workstations.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Keith Harner
> Engineering Compute
> Phone:   480-413-8625
> Pager:   7393862 at skytel.com
> 
> 
>  
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com 
> [mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Ray Van Dolson
> Sent: Wednesday, January 10, 2007 5:06 PM
> To: Discussion list about Kickstart
> Subject: Re: the driverdisk option in the .cfg file
> 
> On Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 05:05:23PM -0700, Harner Keith-FKH006 wrote:
> > I recently received some new Sun Ultra 20 m2 workstations.
> > Our current supported release RHEL3 update 7 does not contain 
> > drivers for this new hardware.
> >  
> > I attempted to utilize the driverdisk option in the .cfg file and 
> > point to an NFS exported directory containing all of the needed
> drivers.
> >  
> > driverdisk --source=nfs:host_ip:path_to_drivers
> >  
> > For some reason it cannot seem to find the drivers although the path

> > is valid and any host can mount it.
> >  
> > What am I missing?
> 
> Keith, are you seeing any error messages in any of the console screens

> you could share with us?
> 
> Ray

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