Disk detection with kickstart

[Petro]

On 22/10/12 4:41 PM, kickstart-list-request at redhat.com wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have to provision the servers and all the servers are different disk 
> types like hda, sda, xvda. So I have issue to detect the disk type 
> itself with kickstart and make partitions. Does anyone have pre 
> installation script that will do this job?

There are a couple of different approaches to this problem.

One is to build a fairly sophisticated one-size-fits-all kickstart 
script that works for every situation. We have one admin at work 
(responsible for a small area--two or three hundred servers) who has 
done this. However he has strong control over his configurations and is 
very knowledgeable.

This is fairly complicated, and honestly if you have to ask for more 
than a very narrow and specfic pointer or two you're not going to have 
much luck.

Another way is to define a different kickstart for each type of server 
and use DHCP/PXE to differentiate between them. I don't have the details 
off the top of my head, but you can create a couple of different 
kickstart servers and then link each IP address to a config. Then when 
the tftp request comes in it gets handed the right ks.cfg file for that 
machine

I've taken a third tack.. I have little control over my configurations 
(I have to mantain a 4.x, 2-3 5.x and so far 3 6.x kickstart 
configurations), but for the most part I have known hardware (HP DL3x0s, 
g4 and up) and I do something (off the top of my head) like this:

%pre

(some stuff to set up resolve.conf and kick ntpd up)

if /dev/sda
     do
     cat << EOF >> /tmp/partitions
<insert partition table for /dev/sda>
EOF

elif /dev/cciss/c0d0
     do
     cat <<EOF>> /tmp/partitions
<partition table for the cciss/c0d0 setup>
EOF
else
     write error file.

(clearly this is NOT the real code, and might have some errors :) )

Then were I'd normally have my disk layout in the ks.cfg I just

%include /tmp/partitons

And yes, in the first iteration I *did* spell it different in one place 
than the other. Just because I like beating my head into brick walls.

The other thing is I only do the first disk/disk set in the ks.cfg, and 
configure the rest of the disks later.