On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 01:14:01PM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
Chuck Anderson wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 08:20:14AM -0600, Les Mikesell wrote:
different ethernet adapters. You can boot in rescue mode from the
install CD and have your old partitions automatically mounted, so
obviously it is possible to figure the driver issues out - but the thing
that can figure it out won't fix things for you. So first you have to
get the right drivers to be included and get rid of the old ones by
twiddling modprobe.conf in some magic ways, build a new initrd, and
perhaps re-configure grub to use it. And if you restored from a backup,
add in making sure the partition identifiers (whatever they might be
this week) match the identifiers in /etc/fstab or you won't even get to
the point where the rescue boot will mount the system to fix it. You
also have much the same problem when adding new hardware after the
initial install or if you swap NIC or disk controller cards. Everyone
needs this basic capability. Server admins just need to be able to
repeat it predictably across a lot of machines.
Once you have the machine in bootable condition with the right drivers
connected to the available hardware, you need a way to interactively
explore the new hardware without a gui, sort of like running 'fdisk -l'
will enumerate the drives and current partitioning, but this tool has to
be adapted to any new ways of describing mountable objects. Similarly a
blkid ?
tool like mii-tool should enumerate your NICs and show which have
link
established - and any other useful information they can detect. Then,
ethtool ?
once you understand the setup for any hardware type you need to be
able
to script it repeatably for any number of instances with a way to supply
whatever variables it might need (i.e. mac addresses, UUID's, etc.).
My objections to the changes in fedora are not so much related to any
details of a change but that they aren't encompassed by scriptable text
based tools that list and set the options or if those exist they are
fragmented into a bunch of choices that have to match whatever anaconda
did that you may not know about.
It probably wouldn't take too much to write a script around blkid and
ethtool to do this.