cmdline ignored

[Klaus Steden]

Hi Amos,

1. I've never done an install in Xen, but if it behaves like the traditional
Anaconda installation, you can use Ctrl-F# to switch to that vt, i.e.
Ctrl-F3 switches to tty3, Ctrl-F2 to tty2, etc. You'll see fairly voluminous
debugging output from the bootstrap and install process on tty5 and tty6,
and if you're using the graphical installer, switching back to tty7 will
return you to X11. This is something you do interactively from the console
... I've never bothered to do any scripting/programming with chvt, so I
can't comment on it.

2. I know it's not something you can do permanently, but it at least buys
you time during %post to investigate and see what's going on. I've used this
approach before to figure out why installs would hang during %post (cfengine
would go zombie sometimes when run) that simply looking at the machine won't
tell you -- you need to get inside it, run the commands that don't work, see
what happens, etc. Once you've identified the culprit, you fix the bug,
disable the sleep statement, and try again with a live install.

As far as trapping the output, I believe Kickstart now supports remote
logging via syslog (it was debated for addition to RHEL4 and similar
versions but didn't make the cut); you could use that to trap messages in
realtime during installation. I resorted to keeping my own, more verbose
logs of installs with some additional hooks in the %post section of my
Kickstart script since I found what Anaconda saved for me to be a little on
the lean side.

hth,
Klaus 

On 7/9/08 4:18 PM, "Amos Shapira" <amos.shapira at gmail.com>did etch on stone
tablets:

> 2008/7/10 Klaus Steden <klaus.steden at thomson.net>:
>> 
>> The usual advice is to stuff a 'sleep 9999999' in there somewhere and check
>> things out on tty2, the virtual console that gets enabled after Kickstart
>> begins.
> 
> Thanks for the advice, but:
> 
> 1. I don't know how to switch to a different vc in a Xen guest
> consolse ("xm con ..."). I tried looking around the xen forums for an
> answer (because the Anaconda docs mention something about each vc
> having all sorts of output sent to it) but as far as I can tell even
> "chvt" doesn't work.
> 
> 2. This "sleep 99999999" (or actually my favourite for indefinite
> pause(2) is "perl -e sleep") isn't something I can put permanently as
> part of the automatic unattended setup but only during debug/dev. I'd
> much prefer something that I can use all the time and keep the install
> unattended and if something goes wrong in a non-dev situation then I
> can see the output.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> --Amos
> 
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