Bill Campbell spake the following on 9/12/2007 4:55 PM:
On Thu, Sep 13, 2007, Karanbir Singh wrote:
Bill Campbell wrote:
How was I using the wrong tool when I was testing a kickstart configuration
file in interactive mode, which I figured would be safe as it would allow
me to exit before it wrote on the disk? I have done similar testing of
autoyast configuration files on many occassions without clobbering
anything.
anaconda-kickstart does not have a simulation mode. it might have been
well worth the time to investigate that before trying it out :)
assumption is dangerous. But then I suppose at this stage you might
point to me and say hindsight is an exacting science. Its always easier
to say what one might have or should have done.
virtual machine technology is fairly far along the road to stability,
thats always a good option when testing such stuff.
Also, when you say interactive mode - what exactly do you mean by that
? because Anaconda has two modes, Interactive and Kickstart scripted.
And as already been pointed out, you can skip portions out of the
kickstart ( its quite common to see the drive partitioning logic
commented out so that the person on $console might be able to do that
himself ), and anaconda will ask you about those questions. But you cant
really have a complete interactive install session and also have a
kickstart script running alongside.
The kickstart configuration file and system-config-kickstart tool
have an option for interactive kickstart installations, which I
ass-u-me-d would work much the same way autoyast automatic installs
do where I can abort the installation any time up to the point
where it says start-install, do you really want to do this?
My approach to writing GUI sysadmin tools is to have the GUI
collect the configuration parameters, then execute one or more
command line tools to do the real work. One of the few things I
really liked about AIX was that their SMIT tool displays the
commands, and logs them as well which can be very useful to
figure out what's going on under the hood. This is a bit easier
than ``touching'' a file to create a timestamp, doing something
with a GUI tool, the using ``find /etc -newer'' to figure out
what the GUI tool is actually doing.
I would hardly call it venting. I've made a serious effort not to say some
of the things that come to mind (particularly when I found that not only
had it nuked my hard drive, but also nuked the external USB drive that
ok thats interesting. by default anaconda should not touch the drives
its not creating partitions on. Unless you expressly tell it to. did
/var/log/anaconda.log, /root/anaconda-ks.cfg, /root/*.log have anything
interesting to say about why it might have nuked that other drive as well ?
That could be useful if I hadn't killed the install, only to find
myself with two empty disks without partition tables.
I just finished reinstalling the system, and now installing all
our OpenPKG based software on it. Doing this, I am reminded of
something worth venting about -- the aliases on rm, mv, and cp to
keep the children from doing dangerous things :-).
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things,
because that would also stop you from doing clever things. --
Doug Gwyn
Sorry I chimed in too late, but there are tools that might have recovered your
partitions without too much work if all that happened was zeroing out the
partition table and not actually zeroing out the drive.
--
MailScanner is like deodorant...
You hope everybody uses it, and
you notice quickly if they don't!!!!
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