[ydl-gen] YDL 5 installation on Xserve

[Atro Tossavainen]

Hello again, been away for a while.  Having a slight problem here.

I finally decided to get rid of YDL 2.3 and replace it with the current
5.0.2 version on the Xserve (G4, 1 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 2*60 GB IDE drives).

I'm starting from scratch - the drives were as good as empty (I
briefly had OS X on the machine today).

I plan, as before, to dedicate the machine to YDL.  It will not have
OS X at all.

I can't install from CDs.  The "yellowdog-5.0.2-20070627-disc1.iso"
boots from CD, but the on-board IDE on the Xserve does not appear to
be supported so the on-board CD drive is invisible.  I also can't boot
the machine from an external FireWire DVD, it seems.  So I'm booting
from CD, but installing the contents of the 7/11 DVD on a system
booted from the 6/27 CDs is impossible, so I have to copy the contents
of the 6/27 CDs to somewhere on the network (or onto a FireWire
portable drive) and install from there.

Now that I've got the installer going, I want to use software mirroring
on pretty much everything.  The installer now seems to allow this.  I
would like to have the partitions laid out as follows:

/dev/hd{e,g}2	Apple_Bootstrap	1MB
	3	Linux_RAID	100MB
	4	Linux_RAID	16GB
	5	Linux_RAID	1GB
	6	Linux_RAID	256MB
	7	Linux_RAID	the rest

with the idea that /dev/mdX = RAID1 of /dev/hd{e,g}Y for X=0,1,2,3
and RAID0 for X=4, and Y=X+3 in every case.

/dev/md0 is going to be /boot,
/dev/md1 is going to be /,
/dev/md2 is going to be swap,
/dev/md3 is going to be a small partition for the AFS cache, and
/dev/md4 is going to be a scratch partition.

I've tried creating the partitions with the installer, but it seems to
want to rearrange things in a nonsensical order (for example, putting
the Apple_Bootstrap partition on the second drive at the very end of
everything, and creating new partitions in the beginning of the disk
and moving previously existing partitions behind the new one), so I've
created the partitions by hand in pdisk to ensure that the layout on
both hard drives is identical, and am using "Custom Layout" in the
installer only to mark the RAID partitions as "Format as ext3, mount
under wherever".  I've mdadm'd them by hand to ensure that the RAID
arrangements work, and I've created file systems on the RAID meta-
devices by hand to ensure that that works, too.

When the partition scheme has been okay'd, and the installer prints out
the bit about how the complete log will be in /root/install.log, it
starts to create the file systems.  But before it does that, it forgets
to mdadm --assemble the RAIDs, and if I've done that in the shell by
hand before hitting Enter there, it explicitly stops them, leaving the
machine without any block devices where the file systems could be
created.  This of course causes the installer to bomb.

So far, I haven't found a way around this.  All hints are welcome.
I'm not going to run a system without mirrored root.  I can putz
around with the anaconda scripts if need be, but I'd prefer a more
general solution.

-- 
Atro Tossavainen (Mr.)               / The Institute of Biotechnology at
Systems Analyst, Techno-Amish &     / the University of Helsinki, Finland,
+358-9-19158939  UNIX Dinosaur     / employs me, but my opinions are my own.
< URL : http : / / www . helsinki . fi / %7E atossava / > NO FILE ATTACHMENTS