Old style fixed partitions in KS-- Anaconda bug??

dwight at supercomputer.org dwight at supercomputer.org
Thu Feb 7 17:24:53 UTC 2008


On Wednesday 06 February 2008 10:41:20 am Cris Rhea wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 06, 2008 at 09:14:59AM -0800, dwight at 
supercomputer.org wrote:
>
> > This has been an annoying problem across all versions of UNIX
> > and Linux ever since UNIX was first put on the PC back in the
> > mid 1980's.
>
> sync; sync; sync  :)

Heh. Ok, only people who've been around a bit seem to know that piece 
of ancient UNIX lore these days. I'm running into a lot of young, 
bright and talented Linux people who don't know about the three 
syncs..

Of course, Kevin Landreth kindly pointed out the better obscure 
commands to do this particular deed. Thank you, Kevin. This thread 
is full of good wisdom.

Here's an obscure bit of trivia. Why is it not one, not two, not 
four, but three syncs?

> > One quick workaround might be to kickstart twice. The first time
> > through, do the partitioning as you have it, and then reboot.
> > The second time would do the rest of your kickstart file. This
> > isn't pleasant, but it might work.
>
> I've tried that-- strangely, it fails the same way.

Hang on now. If the partition table is fully predefined, and you're 
using the onpart arg, and this is happening? Without anything in 
the %pre section?

> IMHO, the various distributions are fighting two battles- one camp
> wants to make loading Linux so simple anybody can do it (the
> distributions where there's /boot and / as the only file systems).
> ...

Ditto that. Currently I'm working with a major systems manufacturer 
to get CentOS/REL imaging going, and this has been quite annoying. I 
can see the issues which get in the way, but these could be handled. 
It's "just" a question of effort.

As far as a debug environment goes (and this is just off the top of 
my head), wouldn't the image loaded down from a PXE install be 
suitable? minstage.img IIRC, on the CD ISO. Combine that on a USB 
stick with a VMWare image, and that might be an ideal debug 
environment. But that's just a quick thought.

   -dwight-





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