Michael DeHaan wrote:
[...]
This reads a bit negatively, as nobody's failing to think here.
Cobbler covers a wide variety of audiences. There are people using it
in home labs, up to systems with 50k+ nodes in distributed data centers
all over the world. A lot of what Cobbler does is totally about making
things simpler and easier to use -- it's the whole reason the project
initially existed. This is the whole reason for automation. The
documentation and help needs for everyone are going to be different, its
not just a linear skill level thing, somebody may not know X while
someone may not know Y. In many cases, it's not even something Cobbler
related… if you've got an Anaconda or pressed problem, for instance,
that's really not Cobbler's problem at all. (now, if rescue changes to
"rescueplease" in Centos 12, we have some work to do)
Firstly my apologies for getting a bit irked about this. I'm banging ny
head on a wall here, because something, somewhere isn't working for us,
and I (still) cannot figure out what it is. Put that another way: I
still haven't found the documentation that points me in the right
direction to be able to help myself.
If something is missing, it's not because we're not thinking of a
beginner audience (or not thinking), it's because we probably thought
something was obvious to most people like us. Ergo, the best person to
fix an unclear section of documentation is the person figuring it out
(by asking here, IRC, and elsewhere) and then updating the documentation
yourself. The fact that cobbler has an option for automating rescue
mode at all (or did, this is mostly discussion about a regression) is a
sign it's trying to make things simple.
Re "updating the docuemntation [my]self": that's fine. In fact, if you
take a look at the wiki, you'll see I've been quite active in the last
couple of days!
But with this current issue I seem to be in a "chicken or egg" problem:
I can't find any documentation (whether good or not-so-good) to point me
down a self-help route both towards my own issue and then towards my
feeding back into improving the documentation.
So anyway, there are two problems -- one that rescue as a kernel option
doesn't work for you, another that we don't create rescue profiles right
now due to a regression, and we could fix it in one of two ways. For
that, I'll take a patch for either, though if we get a patch for
--rescue-mode=true, that one will win, because I like not having to
remember what the original profile was.
Joergen has made some interesting comments along the way, which have
been a great help and have actually changed my thinking.
If I understand correctly, he points out that "rescue mode" is highly
OS-specific, and he questions whether this is scalable and whether it is
philosophically the right approach. And I'm beginning to see his point
of view.
(Indeed, I've always been keen on portability. My previous
contributions to Samba (quota, VxFS) and to Linux-HA/heartbeat have been
in just this same arena of portability!)
So while my immediate issue is wanting to get my Redhat box in rescue
mode, I can now see that having a "cobbler system edit ... rescue" may
not be the most appropriate way to achieve this. (I'm not necessarily
backing off my request; but i recognise that this is not as clear-cut as
I had originally thought.)
Perhaps it might be better if I re-cast my end-user query another way:
<query>
Our Cobbler set-up, with RHEL clients, lists every system. When these
install, the installation goes straight through, uninterrupted. But we
also wish to use this Cobbler set-up occasionally on particular systems
so that the PXE-boot puts us, in a quasi-DVD-like manner, into the usual
red screen which would allow us to select rescue mode.
Starting from this Cobbler set-up, what hooks, tweaks and changes do we
need to employ to achieve this?
P.S. If this isn't in the existing wiki documentation, I would be happy
to write it up.
</query>
Note that our existing Cobbler set-up takes the client installation
through to completion uninterrupted, /without/ presenting the usual red
countdown screen and boot prompt.
A good start for me would simply to be able to get it to give me that
boot prompt. (Although I suspect that further work may still be necessary.)
Michael Mann helpfully provided the link:
http://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5/html/Installation_Guide/s1-rescuemode-boot.html
But that's all about "when you get to the boot prompt...". My initial
stumbling block problem is that our existing Cobbler set-up doesn't give
me such a prompt.
Have I missed a Cobbler setting (or perhaps a kickstart detail?) that
would toggle this give/hide boot-prompt?
--
: David Lee
: ECMWF (Data Handling System)
: Shinfield Park
: Reading RG2 9AX
: Berkshire
:
: tel: +44-118-9499 362
: email: [email protected]
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