Alligning partitions

[Gerhardus Geldenhuis]

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.

* 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.

* 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.

If I need to rtfm, the please point me in the right direction.

Best Regards

-- 
Gerhardus Geldenhuis
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