Andrew Brown wrote:Is there a new attachment we can look at for this?
> Okay, a few things since yesterday:
> I'm not worrying about the hard drive device issue for the moment, it
> seems to be related to whether the bladecenter media tray is assigned
> to that blade or not.
>
> I've also edited the code to ignore listed partitions of type "Empty"
> or "Extended"
One thing to check is to stop before rebooting and see if grub is
>
> But somehow the process isn't working. I followed the process very
> closely of xcat, a similar provisioning engine. After taking and
> restoring an image, it doesn't boot.
>
>
> I tried the process manually today. That is, I booted with a live cd
> and ran each command myself. Saved the mbr, saved the partition table
> with sfdisk, and saved the contents of each partition of a freshly
> installed linux installation.
>
> Then I went to the next blade, identical hardware and setup, and
> booted the live cd up.
> -Restored partition entries with sfdisk
> -Restored mbr with dd
> -Restored partitions again with sfdisk. I don't fully understand why
> it's done again, this was just following the xcat process (for which
> I can post the exact code if anyone's curious).
> -And of course restore all partitions one at a time
>
> When I tried to boot it back up, it got as far as printing "GRUB" and
> hung there. I need some help here, I'm not sure what's going on.
installed correctly, or if any errors happen during grub-install. For
that, it may be worth running through the script line by line or at
least logging the output of each step w/ debug output printed before
each command as needed.
Grub lives in the MBR, though are you calling grub-install after all of
>
> I tried a different order to restoring partition/mbr info: Restore
> partition stuff with sfdisk, and then the mbr with dd. I was thinking
> sfdisk may have overwritten the mbr or something, but I got the same
> results.
that?
>
> Anyone have any ideas?
>
> -Andrew
>
> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 1:39 PM, Andrew Brown <ambrown4@ncsu.edu
> <mailto:ambrown4@ncsu.edu>> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
> I thought I'd give an update on where I am. I've been working on
> a live cd image that will boot up and take/restore an image to an
> nfs export and then reboot.
>
> Attached are the base.cfg kickstart file and build.py script to
> build the live cd. It is somewhat untested at the moment. Taking
> images works but I haven't yet tried restoring them (I plan to do
> that shortly).
>
> The process for saving an image is as follows, and this is mostly
> identical to how xcat does it:
> 0) mounts remote nfs export at /mnt/nfs
> 1) saves off the mbr with e.g. "dd if=/dev/sda
> of=/mnt/nfs/imagename/mbr bs=512 count=1"
> 2) Saves off extended partition image information with "sfdisk
> /dev/sda -d > /mnt/nfs/imagename/sfdisk"
> 3) Loops for each partition listed in the output of "sfdisk -l
> /dev/sda"
> 3.a) If the partition type (last column) is "Empty", skip it
> 3.b) Save the partition with e.g. "dd if=/dev/sda1
> of=/mnt/nfs/imagename/1 conv=sync,noerror"
>
> Eventually we can use the partition type to determine if we can
> use partimage on it (for ext/ntfs partitions) or if we can do
> something else (swap partitions, mkswap to restore). For now,
> everything is copied with dd.
>
>
> The script expects arguments to be passed through the kernel
> command line. Here are the arguments it needs:
> nfs= the nfs path to mount. e.g. 10.10.10.1:/export
> image= the name of the image to save/restore. This translates to
> the folder name under the nfs path where files will be saved.
> drive= the local drive where things will be saved
> save|load either one of these is specified and the image is
> either saved or loaded
>
>
> And to make a long post even longer, I was wondering if anyone
> could shed some light on an odd problem. It seems that while in
> the live environment, the one and only hard drive appears as
> /dev/sdb instead of the expected /dev/sda. I was trying this on
> an IBM bladecenter blade, and found that /dev/sda was something
> else and the hard drive was assigned /dev/sdb. It's not like this
> in a non-live environment. Anyone have any ideas?
> -Andrew
>
>
> On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 8:39 AM, Michael DeHaan <mdehaan@redhat.com
> <mailto:mdehaan@redhat.com>> wrote:
>
> Andrew Brown wrote:
> >
> > I'm assuming you are building this on F9?
> >
> >
> > I wasn't, I was using the script and kickstart in the koan
> source
> > which was fc8. I've switched to the development branch
> which is fc9
> > and re-built it.
> >
> > The cd image that comes out of that works, as in, it boots
> and starts
> > executing the scripts. I believe I can modify things to do
> what we need.
> >
> > I also tried using the livecd-iso-to-pxe script to convert
> the iso
> > into a pxe boot kernel/initrd and pxelinux config file.
> That also
> > worked as far as I could tell booting an actual machine
> using the
> > generated /tftpboot tree (it generates a kernel, initrd, and
> pxelinux
> > config file)
> >
> > However, I tried booting the kernel and initrd with qemu
> using its
> > -kernel and -initrd options, and it wouldn't work. I'd like
> to get
> > this to work if possible so I can rapidly try new images without
> > booting up actual hardware.
> > It's actually not that big of a deal because qemu boots the
> iso just
> > fine. I'm just curious why it wouldn't boot the kernel/initrd
> > directly. The command line looks like this:
> >
> > qemu -m 256 -hda ~/disk.qcow2 -kernel vmlinuz0 -initrd
> initrd0.img
> > -append "root=/koan-live-cd.iso rootfstype=iso9660
> rootflags=loop"
> >
>
> This is what koan is for.
>
> If using a VM:
>
> # on cobbler server
> cobbler image add --name=livecd
> --path=nfs://server/path/to/livecd.iso
>
> # on host system
> koan --virt --virt-type=qemu --image=livecd
>
> This all goes through the virtinst libraries to make sure the
> correct
> arguments are used. If that /still/ fails, we can debug this.
>
> The process for PXEbooting that still involves "cobbler distro
> add" and
> not "image add" based on the Wiki link "AllAboutImages" I posted
> yesterday.
>
> > It errors with a kernel panic being unable to mount the root
> > filesystem. The append line was copied from the generated
> pxe config
> > from the livecd-iso-to-pxe script. /koan-live-cd.iso is a
> file in the
> > initrd.
> >
> >
> > Anyways, if that's a dead end, I won't worry about it. I'm
> going to
> > try and modify the koan live cd to be a cloner live cd. I'm
> first
> > going to get it working with dd, since partimage isn't in
> the repos
> > and I'll have to build it myself.
>
> Yep, we're going to want to get partimage packaged for Fedora.
>
>
>
> > -Andrew
> >
> > On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 2:58 PM, Michael DeHaan
> <mdehaan@redhat.com <mailto:mdehaan@redhat.com>
> > <mailto:mdehaan@redhat.com <mailto:mdehaan@redhat.com>>> wrote:
> >
> > Andrew Brown wrote:
> > > So I've started looking at the script that builds a
> koan live cd
> > (the
> > > 'live' directory in the koan source) to modify it to
> do what we
> > need,
> > > but I'm having trouble getting the code to produce a
> bootable iso.
> > >
> > > I'm just trying to run the build.py script as is, and
> it produces a
> > > koan-live-cd.iso. But when I boot it, it gets several
> errors about
> > > mounting the root filesystem, as well as several other
> errors that I
> > > can type up here if you want. The last line looks
> like "switchroot:
> > > mount failed: No such file or directory"
> > >
> > > I need to get this working before I can move on to
> editing it
> > for the
> > > cloner imaging. Any idea what's going on with this?
> > > -Andrew
> >
> > Sure. Perhaps you can take a picture of the actual
> error, so we
> > can run
> > it by the livecd-tools folks?
> >
> > I'm assuming you are building this on F9?
> >
> > --Michael
> >
> >
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