Hi All,
So presently today, as I understand things there is no way that I can see to simply tell anaconda to use the media I booted from to acquire the kickstart file. When you specify "cdrom" that means the first cdrom not the one I booted from (some systems you can boot from the bottom cdrom). In cases where I use a usb flash drive I have to specify the precise device name, which makes the syslinux config particular to a certain hardware and which port the USB drive was plugged into. This is posing problems for us when we try to distribute one CDROM that just does the right thing.
I know where in loader to patch this, but what I don't know is how to detect from what device I booted. So my first question is how do I detect from which device I booted?
An alternate strategy is to "scan" for the device. Such that if one specified cdrom, anaconda would look on each cdrom it found till it found a device. This could not be the default behavior, so I'm looking in this case for a reasonable way denote this. Would you guys prefer a --scanks/--scanForKS option to be used in conjuction with the ks=$dev:$path URL, or some way to specify within the URL, like ks=$dev(scan):$path?
With the find it I on the media I booted from would you like its device tag to be something like "bootmedia:" or something else?
Thanks...james
On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 10:53 -0500, James Olin Oden wrote:
Hi All,
So presently today, as I understand things there is no way that I can see to simply tell anaconda to use the media I booted from to acquire the kickstart file. When you specify "cdrom" that means the first cdrom not the one I booted from (some systems you can boot from the
This is not a direct answer to your question, but might be useful anyhow...
FC6's anaconda looks for ks.cfg on all cdrom devices until it finds the file or runs out of devices to try. The same will be true in RHEL5 and RHEL4.5.
HTH, Dave
On 1/25/07, David Lehman dlehman@redhat.com wrote:
On Thu, 2007-01-25 at 10:53 -0500, James Olin Oden wrote:
Hi All,
So presently today, as I understand things there is no way that I can see to simply tell anaconda to use the media I booted from to acquire the kickstart file. When you specify "cdrom" that means the first cdrom not the one I booted from (some systems you can boot from the
This is not a direct answer to your question, but might be useful anyhow...
Well, yeah it does, because what your saying is its been considered, a path has been choosen, and all little me (6'7" and all) needs to do is back port to my version of anaconda....sweet.
FC6's anaconda looks for ks.cfg on all cdrom devices until it finds the file or runs out of devices to try. The same will be true in RHEL5 and RHEL4.5.
Now how do they handle non-cdrom devices? do they do the same sort of search? Obviously that would only work for physical devices like disks or floppies.
Thanks for the info...james
James Olin Oden wrote:
Hi All,
So presently today, as I understand things there is no way that I can see to simply tell anaconda to use the media I booted from to acquire the kickstart file. When you specify "cdrom" that means the first cdrom not the one I booted from (some systems you can boot from the bottom cdrom). In cases where I use a usb flash drive I have to specify the precise device name, which makes the syslinux config particular to a certain hardware and which port the USB drive was plugged into. This is posing problems for us when we try to distribute one CDROM that just does the right thing.
[snip] Yes and no. It is possible to put kickstart files in the initrd.img. In that case they are consistant: file:/my.ks
However, the location of the install media to be used in the install may not always be sda, especially on systems with internal SATA drives.
So that leads to the same issue: What do I put in the kickstart file to identify the location of the install media?
Another note:
When installing from a USB drive, grub will smash the MBR of the USB device at the end of the install. Not good.
Phil Meyer wrote:
When installing from a USB drive, grub will smash the MBR of the USB device at the end of the install. Not good.
This is probably because the BIOS is showing that the USB drive was first and we default to ordering based on the BIOS order when we can detect it via EDD.
You can specify an explicit drive order in your ks.cfg with bootloader --driveorder
Jeremy
James Olin Oden wrote:
I know where in loader to patch this, but what I don't know is how to detect from what device I booted. So my first question is how do I detect from which device I booted?
Unfortunately, this isn't something that you can get out of a BIOS. Have I mentioned how much the PC BIOS sucks? ;-)
An alternate strategy is to "scan" for the device. Such that if one specified cdrom, anaconda would look on each cdrom it found till it found a device. This could not be the default behavior, so I'm looking in this case for a reasonable way denote this. Would you guys prefer a --scanks/--scanForKS option to be used in conjuction with the ks=$dev:$path URL, or some way to specify within the URL, like ks=$dev(scan):$path?
A third approach would be to actually use something that's actually unique about the device and use that. In a lot of respects, I'd *far* rather that. Because then we're looking for something explicit instead of a roulette in the case where there's more than one device with a file named ks.cfg. Also, having such a syntax would be helpful in other cases as well.
Jeremy
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