format some partitions, don't format others

Hi -- I'm working on setting up an autoinstall infrastructure that will be used to convert around 750 machines from a customized Slackware distribution to SLES9SP3. Obviously, automation of as much as possible is key. We'd also like to borrow a page from the ROCKS folks and make re-installs as painless as possible, because it's something that comes up in our environment a fair bit. The general idea is to have two "standard" partitions, / and /var, on /dev/md0 (sd[ab]1) and /dev/md1 (sd[ab]2), respectively, and then have some more specific RAID partitions on the remaining parts of the disk (with different sorts of machines having different sorts of partitioning schemes). During an initial install (which can be assumed to mean "an install onto disks that don't have a partition table yet"), all of these partitions would need to be created and initialized, the RAIDs set up, and the filesystems created. During a reinstall, we would only want to reformat '/' and '/var' -- any other partitions/RAID devices/filesystems should be left alone. The /etc/fstab file will be managed with our configuration management system, so having that maintained properly across reinstalls isn't a concern -- as long as the reinstall can get to the point where it will boot and mount / and /var, everything will converge to the desired state once the tool runs. The goal is to do this with only a single install.xml config file. It's not clear from the AutoYaST PDF whether or not this is possible -- can anybody here shed some light on whether this particular windmill is a good tilting target or not? thanks, john. -- It's easy to get the *wrong* answer in O(1) time. Mark Jason Dominus's Good Advice #11963

On Friday 19 May 2006 23:49, John SJ Anderson wrote:
During an initial install (which can be assumed to mean "an install onto disks that don't have a partition table yet"), all of these partitions would need to be created and initialized, the RAIDs set up, and the filesystems created. During a reinstall, we would only want to reformat '/' and '/var' -- any other partitions/RAID devices/filesystems should be left alone.
The goal is to do this with only a single install.xml config file. It's not clear from the AutoYaST PDF whether or not this is possible -- can anybody here shed some light on whether this particular windmill is a good tilting target or not?
I think that's doable but not with a single xml config file. You have to deal at least with rules (rules/rules.xml) to catch the cases "new installation" and "reuse partitions". Maybe even more cases because you mentioned that different machines will need different partition layout. -- ciao, Uwe Gansert Uwe Gansert, Server Technologies Team SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Maxfeldstrasse 5, D-90409 Nuernberg, Germany e-mail: uwe.gansert@suse.de, Tel: +49-(0)911-74053-0, Fax: +49-(0)911-74053-476, Web: http://www.suse.de
participants (2)
-
John SJ Anderson
-
Uwe Gansert