[sisuite-users] RE : RE : Building SystemImager on CentOS 6.2? HELP

[Ole H. N. <Ole...@fy...>]

LAHAYE Olivier <oli...@ce...> wrote:
> After trying to use my RPM on a CentOS-6.2 system, I'm facing some issues that are hard to fix, thus I'm asking before starting to try to make a update so it works on CentOS-6.2
>
> 1st of all, I've already made some fix to systemimager so it works on CentOS-6.2, unfortunately, I'm stuck with systemconfigurator which is not supported on CentOS-6.2 (kernel-2.6) and therfore disable with no equivalent in systemimager. Because of this, the bootloader is not written to disk after the imaging, and therfore, the imaged system is unable to boot.
>
> So the actual situation is the following:
> - systemimager-4.1.99.svn4568/lib/SystemImager/Server.pm:1788 SystemConfigurator deprecated and nothing to do its job (configure and write bootloader, ...)
>
> - systemconfigurator-2.2.11-1/lib/SystemConfig/{Initrd/RH.pm, Boot*, ???} need to be fixed to have kernel 2.6+ properly handeled (initramfs instead of initrd, dracut instead of initrd (compatible script exist for the moment), ...
>
> So now, I need help on having the ##SYSTEMCONFIGURATOR_PRE## and  #SYSTEMCONFIGURATOR_POST## steps working in SystemImager. Works need to be done on the autoinstallscript and in systemconfigurator (or equivalent).

I share your frustrations about systemconfigurator (and thus also 
SystemImager) not supporting CentOS 6.x!  My experiences so far agree 
with yours: It's possible to tweak SystemImager to install a CentOS 6.x 
image onto a SI client's hard disk, but that image is unfortunately not 
bootable :-(

Unfortunately I'm unable to help you with systemconfigurator.  But I can 
add some observations regarding the use of SystemImager with CentOS 6.x 
(we're at 6.3 now) which reflect my experimentation to date:

1. SystemImager trunk as well as older versions CANNOT build on a CentOS 
6.x system because several software packages (kernel, parted) are 
incompatible.  The SI trunk won't even build on CentOS 5.x owing to the 
gzip package :-(

2. SystemImager packages built on a CentOS 5.x system CAN be installed 
correctly on CentOS 6.x SI server and golden client systems!  Older 
versions of SI from CentOS 5.x seem to be working just fine on CentOS 
6.x, and you can use si_getimage successfully.

3. A SI CentOS 6.x SI client machine can be installed correctly from the 
6.x SI server in the usual way.  However, at the end of the cloning 
process systemconfigurator gives some error messages, and the SI client 
is unable to boot :-(

4. If the SI clients have new hardware (Intel Sandy Bridge, for 
example), the SI kernel may be too old to work properly.

Related to SI, the SALI project (https://subtrac.sara.nl/oss/sali) at 
SARA, Amsterdam offers a much newer kernel and initrd supporting modern 
filesystems and new hardware(?).

You can replace the SI kernel/initrd with the SALI kernel/initrd when 
booting SI clients, and even run your old SI .master installation 
scripts!  Some minor tweaks to the .master script must be performed as 
documented in 
https://subtrac.sara.nl/oss/sali/wiki/SaliUsage/UsingYourOldInstallScript. 
  It really works!  Of course, the installed CentOS 6.x client still 
won't boot due to systemconfigurator :-(

SALI has their own master scripts which are a lot simpler than the SI 
scripts, but I think SALI hasn't been ported to CentOS 6.x yet because 
1) SALI still relies upon systemconfigurator, and 2) SALI doesn't seem 
to support LVM.

In conclusion, it seems to me that if you can make systemconfigurator 
work correctly on CentOS 6.x, then SI and/or SALI should work as well 
for installing clients that will be bootable.

A totally different cloning approach would be to use RedHat's Kickstart 
- some of my colleagues have turned from SI to Kickstart already.  If 
you add Cobbler (http://cobbler.github.com/) on top of Kickstart you may 
have quite a powerful cloning setup.

Regards,
Ole

-- 
Ole Holm Nielsen
Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark