Bug in anaconda / kickstart...

[Linux PowerEdge]

any reason you do not use the existing partitioning mechanisms
available to the installer?

i'm currently out of the office but willing to test further later this
week when i return.  if you want to strip any env specific items from
your ks.cfg that should not be shared with the outside world and send
the ks.cfg i'll work off of that.




On 2/4/08, Cris Rhea <crhea at mayo.edu> wrote:
> I came across a series of postings by Matt Domach and Michael Brown regarding
> Anaconda/Kickstart and disk signatures (Dell desktop list)...
>
> I'm looking for some advice in how to get what I believe is a bug in
> Anaconda fixed (or at least find a work-around)-- finding folks who understand
> the inner workings of Anaconda has proven to be difficult.
>
> Here's what I'm trying to do:
>
> In the Kickstart file, I am manually partitioning the disk:
>
> %pre
>
> sfdisk -uM /dev/sda <<EOF
> ,150,L
> ,,E
> ;
> ;
> ,512,L
> ,2048,S
> ,6000,L
> ,2048,L
> ,10000,L
> ,,L
> EOF
>
> -----
>
>
> In the install section of the KS file, I'm assigning specific file systems
> to those partitions:
>
> part /boot --fstype ext3 --onpart sda1
> part /tmp --fstype ext3 --onpart sda9
> part /var --fstype ext3 --onpart sda8
> part swap --onpart sda6
> part /local1 --fstype ext3 --onpart sda10
> part /usr --fstype ext3 --onpart sda7
> part / --fstype ext3 --onpart sda5
>
>
> This technique has worked for years... (on simple, single disk web servers, cluster
> nodes, etc., I don't see any advantage to using LVM for everything as most installs
> do by default these days).
>
> If I do the above, Anaconda croaks (and the install aborts) with:
>
> 15:27:41 CRITICAL: parted exception: Error: Error informing the kernel about
> modifications to partition /dev/sda5 -- Device or resource busy.  This means
> Linux won't know about any changes you made to /dev/sda5 until you reboot -- so you
> shouldn't mount it or use it in any way before rebooting.
>
> I'm running CentOS--
>
> This worked in CentOS4.4, but broke in 4.5 onward (including CentOS 5.0/5.1).
> Previously, I could work around this by loading the OS from a static repository
> of CentOS 4.4 and apply the updates to bring it up to 4.6. Since all versions of 5
> are broken, I can no longer build systems using Kickstart + this method.
>
> I have a couple Anaconda dump files if anybody is interested... (about 10K lines each).
>
> Traceback (most recent call first):
>   File "/tmp/treedir.24162/instimage/usr/lib/anaconda/partedUtils.py", line 892, in savePartitions
>     disk.commit()
>   File "/tmp/treedir.24162/instimage/usr/lib/anaconda/packages.py", line 147, in turnOnFilesystems
>     anaconda.id.diskset.savePartitions ()
>   File "/usr/lib/anaconda/dispatch.py", line 201, in moveStep
>     rc = stepFunc(self.anaconda)
>   File "/usr/lib/anaconda/dispatch.py", line 124, in gotoNext
>     self.moveStep()
>   File "/usr/lib/anaconda/gui.py", line 1018, in nextClicked
>     self.anaconda.dispatch.gotoNext()
>   File "/usr/lib/anaconda/iw/progress_gui.py", line 243, in renderCallback
>     self.intf.icw.nextClicked()
>   File "/usr/lib/anaconda/gui.py", line 1045, in handleRenderCallback
>     self.currentWindow.renderCallback()
> error: Error: Error informing the kernel about modifications to partition /dev/sda5 -- Device or resource busy.  This means Linux won't know about any changes you made to /dev/sda5 until you reboot -- so you shouldn't mount it or use it in any way before rebooting.
>
>
> I can reproduce this 100% of the time, on a variety of hardware-- my latest
> attempts to find a work-around have been on a PE1855 blade...
>
> I don't understand how to build a boot-disk image from scratch well enough to
> try to debug Anaconda myself...
>
> I'd appreciate any ideas/pointers...  I've been looking for a solution for
> about 6 months.... listed this as a bug on the CentOS site, but either nobody
> has the Anaconda knowledge or the time...
>
> --- Cris
>
>
> --
>  Cristopher J. Rhea
>  Mayo Clinic - Research Computing Facility
>  200 First St SW, Rochester, MN 55905
>  crhea at Mayo.EDU
>  (507) 284-0587
>
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