Alligning partitions

[Petro]

On 11/28/11 22:26 PM, Gerhardus Geldenhuis wrote:
> Hi
> I am building Red Hat 5.4 and 5.5 boxes on VMWare and some on HP 
> blades with SAN attached storage. I need to do 
> partition alignment during build which I understand is done 
> automatically in Red Hat 6's version of anaconda and later but not yet 
> in 5.4, 5.5. So a number of questions:
> * I could not find an option for part in the 
> docs  (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Anaconda/Kickstart#part_or_partition) 
> that easily allow me to set a sector offset. I have found a number of 
> ways to do this but was wondering if there is an hidden option to do 
> this using part. Currently I am using fdisk to create a partition 
> starting at sector 64 rather than 63 for SAN storage and doing the 
> same for VMWare boxes.

I *thought* (check with VMware) that after Vsphere 3 you wouldn't need 
to align the partitions any more--but the last time I checked was in 
2009, so I could be seriously wrong. Or you could be running V3, in 
which case...

> * How can I easily debug my kickstart? I currently change the 
> kickstart and then reboot the physical server but that is 
> very painful as it has to go through all of the bios checks etc and 
> then sometime I forget to press F12... I tried adding a sleep 100000 
> to my pre scripts which works and allows me to run some commands on 
> the command line but I am not sure how to "reparse" the kickstart file 
> to test whether new settings works.

I usually use VMware Workstation/Player to debug my kickstart scripts, 
with lots of redirecting to different log files. This lets me sit in my 
somewhat comfy chair in a slightly quieter machine room (my desk is on a 
raised floor, but most of the servers are in the other room) and watch 
the installs while I do other things. Then when I've got it mostly right 
I run it on the real hardware, which would (eventually) be a known 
transform.

> * Also rather than use clever ways of getting a list of drives or 
> anything similar... is there predefined procedures/variables that I 
> can use, are they available in all scripting languages (bash, python) 
> and where/how could I easily get a list of available variables for 
> scripting.
I suspect if there was a clever call for it in kickstart that underneath 
it would use a "clever" way and be not so portable to new hardware. This 
is actually a more difficult problem than you'd think at first, what 
with iSCSI, FCOE, SCSI, SATA, IDE, whatever HP does to get 
/dev/cciss/c0d0 stuff etc.

Would be nice though.

Regards,
Petro.
L at b R at t.
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