Hi,
I'm having trouble making kickstart work with RedHat 6.2 on an IBM x342
server. The machines are dual-processor systems with 4 gigs of ram and
hardware scsi raid-1 disk arrays. I know 6.2 is a bit antiquated, and I
have got this working on 7.2, but people who have clusters of 6.2
machines now would rather add one more 6.2 and keep them all on the same
version, than migrate the whole cluster to 7.2. Right now, we perform
these installations manually.
The problem is that the default boot image (in 6.2) doesn't support the
SCSI raid controller this system uses. Thus, the install always fails
with on supported hdds found. In 7.2 it is supported, and everything is
wonderful.
I have a driver disk for RH 6.2, which I got off the IBM server CD. I
can do a manual install using this driver disk. If someone knows how I
can use kickstart and use this drive disk, that would be an ok solution
to this problem (All install files must be on CD or FDD). However, as
far as I can see, the only way to use the driver disk with kickstart is
to put the driver on the hard drive, which obviously isn't possible if
it's a harddrive driver.
Instead, I tried to build a new boot image that included this driver. It
looked easy enough since the driver disk contains a single ips.o file
for around 15 different kernel releases, including the 2.2.14 build used
in RH 6.2 For each kernel release, it has a <Release>, <Release>BOOT and
<Release>SMP folder with this file in it.
On the boot disk, I decompressed everything, added the ips.o file the
from 2.2.14-5.0BOOT folder to the modules.cgz file with all the other .o
files, updated the pcitable and module-info files, and booted off my new
boot image (on a floppy). This loaded and detected the SCSI array and
successully completed a manual or a kickstart install. Unforunately,
when I rebooted, the system died with a "vfs: cannot open root device"
error. A few lines up, I notice that ips.o failed to load with a generic
error message (device busy or in use).
- I've tried using the .o files from the plain <Release> and
<Release>SMP folders, but these result in incompatible kernel version
errors when I use the boot image.
- The .cgz archive contains the 2.2.14-5.0BOOT folder. I tried adding a
2.2.14-5.0 and 2.2.14-5.0SMP folders to the disk with those driver
versions, but that didn't help.
- I've tried various options in various places to try and use kickstart
and the driver disk together, but I have yet to find a working combination
- I've noticed that if I get do a manual install using the driver disk
and save the boot disk it creates, then I can use this to boot the
machine I installed using my boot image, even though I can't boot it off
the hard drive itself.
-
I eventually tracked this down to the version of the ips.o file on the
harddrive boot image (initrd) -- it's the wrong one. I don't know which
one it is, I can't find one with that file size anywhere, but the
version of this file appears to be the only difference between a booting
boot image and one that dies with a VFS error. In the boot image that
works, the file used is the one from the driver disk 2.2.14-5.0.
Interesting that it isn't the smp one since it's an smp machine, but oh
well..
So, my questions are:
1) Can I actually use a driver disk with a ks file, and if so, how? I
can only use CD's or floppies for the install files.
2) How can I fix my boot image so that the initrd file that gets placed
on the hard drive has the right ips.o version? I would like to be able
to do this with or without kickstart. (Although it is probably possible
I don't want to just copy a working initrd over in the the %post script)
Can anyone shed some light on this, or let me know where I can go for help?
Thanks,
Geoff Hart
