How to constrain the install through kickstart to one drive

[Broekman, Maarten]

If you always know that the drive you want to install on is /dev/sda,
--ondisk will do the trick.  The tricky part comes if different machines
have their drives addressed in different ways (/dev/hda, /dev/sda, etc).
In those cases you can still use a single ks file be creative use of the
%pre section to determine the correct disk name to clear and partition.

I use a single ks file for each RHEL (one for RHEL3, one for RHEL4, etc)
regardless of whether I'm installing on a physical machine
(/dev/cciss/c0d0) or virtual machine (/dev/sda) by checking the loaded
modules (lsmod) in the %pre section and then changing the partition
table accordingly.  This also lets me address different drive sizes in
different ways.

On the other hand, the kickstart files become a bit more complicated and
the chance of errors in the kickstart file go up, but it is possible.
The use of multiple kickstart files also depends on the application
loadout of the systems you're installing on.  If all the systems get the
same package load, then one kickstart file is easy to maintain.  If
different servers get different loads, then it's much easier to manage
that with multiple kickstart files.

Maarten Broekman

-----Original Message-----
From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Phil Savoie
Sent: Tuesday, September 18, 2007 2:28 PM
To: redhat-list at redhat.com
Subject: Re: How to constrain the install through kickstart to one drive

Thanks for responding both Andrew and Maarten.

Ok then,  I was hoping that there was a way to say, regardless of what
drives 
are installed in the pc, just load the drive that's hanging off Primary 
Master and leave the rest alone?  This is basically what I want to do.
I 
just didn't want to go through the pc's to find out exactly what type of

drives are installed.  Not to start an OS flame war but I can do this in

Solaris using the keyword "bootdisk" in the jumpstart profile.  Just 
wondering if there was something similar in ES4.

Thank you again, for your time...

Phil

On September 18, 2007 13:28:28 Andrew Bacchi wrote:
> You can't always use one size fits all.  We have many kickstart files
> for our many servers.  Each kickstart is tailored for a type of server
> and we use the type that best suits our needs.
>
> So, the ondisk=sda/hda problem is solved by using the appropriate
> kickstart file.  At the install screen we define which kickstart to
use
> with "linux ks=kickstart_file_name".
>
> Phil Savoie wrote:
> > HI All,
> >
> > I have a number of machines I would like to install using kickstart.

> > This isn't the problem as this I know how to do...but, some pc's
have
> > more than one HD installed.  Some of the pc's have pata, sata or ide
> > drives; that is a mixture of all I have mentioned.  In order to
combat
> > the problem of kickstart not working on all types of disks, I took
out
> > the  ondisk=[s|h]da.  This works well on a pc with a single disk.
With
> > more than one disk, the second disk also get a filesystem.  I don't
want
> > the second disk touched at all.  Is there a way to do this?
> >
> > Thanks in advance,
> >
> > Phil
>
> --
> veritatis simplex oratio est
> 		-Seneca
>
> Andrew Bacchi
> Systems Programmer
> Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
> phone: 518.276.6415  fax: 518.276.2809
>
> http://www.rpi.edu/~bacchi/


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