[ydl-gen] YDL 5 installation on Xserve

[Atro Tossavainen]

> I'm jumping into this without reading the entire thread, so this might
> have been covered previously.

No problem.

> Two questions:
>     Have you tried a network install?  

That's the only thing I'm doing in actual fact.

YDL 5.0.2 (CDs dated Jun 27, 2007) does not recognize the Kauai IDE
controller in the Xserve.  Open Firmware is able to load the kernel and
initrd from the CD, but as soon as the kernel boots, it doesn't see a
CD drive in the machine.

I can't boot from a FireWire DVD either.  The machine just won't.

If I boot from the June 27 CDs and try to install from the July 11 DVD,
it croaks about version mismatch between the two and refuses to carry on.

What I've done so far is that I've copied the contents of all six CDs
onto a directory on another machine that I've shared out with NFS, and
I'm booting from the CD and installing from the NFS share.  I suppose
I could be doing this over http as well, but I also think this is
completely inconsequential.  I'm able to get to the installation files
one way or another.  That is not a problem.

>     Can you drop to the anaconda command prompt and see the fw device
>     (either parted, kernel message, etc?) and it just doesn't appear
>     in the gui partitioning page?

Yes, precisely.

> With the first, there is some black magic that can be done to
> install packages from one release (5.0.2) with a separate 
> boot disk kernel (5.0.1).
> 
> With the second, it would help us debug anaconda a bit a formulate
> an intelligent answer.

Well, let me know when you find something out.  I'd be glad to try
whatever you come up with to get this to work.

But really, I don't *want* to install to the external FireWire drive.
I want to install to a mirror pair (aka Linux software RAID).  This
should be first priority as far as I am concerned.

As I said in my initial message:

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 that I've already created, and if I've
done that in the shell by hand before hitting Enter in the GUI, 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.

-- 
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.
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