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Bug#238653: debian-installer network config & evms



On Thu, 18 Mar 2004 21:41:37 +0000, Martin Michlmayr wrote:
>* Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org> [2004-03-18 16:11]:
>> > Is the d-i kernel really lacking device-mapper? 
>> 
>> Well it's the stock debian kernel. No idea.

>dm-mod is included in the md-modules udeb.

That's true, the kernel (2.4.25-1-386) coming with the installer 
has the device-mapper module. However I tried loading it 
explicitly, but still evms does not find any drives to work on.

This is contrast to when using my own 2.6.4 kernel. What I missed 
at my first try was mounting sysfs on /sys, which is required for 
evms on 2.6. The evms (& evmsn) as shipped in the netinst-iso 
from 20040316 works! (besides that wrong library link and missing 
ncurses). So there's not much to do on the evms itself, but make 
it startable from d-i. The rest is up to the kernel.

Things were getting harder after setting up a root-volume with 
evms. First mount hangs when mounting a JFS from a disc volume 
with my kernel, mounting it from a file (-o loop) works, but 
this is not d-i specific (I think). Continued with XFS then. The 
next problem was how to let d-i know, that there is a readily 
prepared root fs. In woody I simply had to mount to /target and 
everything was fine, now I had to figure out, how to write a 
fake /etc/partman/fstab.d script just echoing my fstab entries.
I think there should be ways to skip steps in d-i without having 
to fake that much. If I want to create my partitions manually 
I don't want to be forced to use d-i partman for creation of the 
mountpoints (btw partman didn't work with my kernel, just showed 
an empty list).
Installing the base system shows a similar problem, since it 
tries to install kernel-image-2.4.25-1-386 and fails on creation 
of the mkinitrd. I got my own kernel-package installed by hand, 
but was not able to do a base-install that leaves the kernel as 
it is and just do the rest... 
...thus the system booted somehow (after I had prepared an initrd 
for evms and grub), but just stopped after entering runlevel 2. 
Probably some part of the base installation is still missing.

In my opinion it should be able to have d-i skip some parts if 
somebody wants to. I don't like being forced to do everything 
by hand in such a case... And well, for curiosity I tried d-i's 
"install grub boot-loader" but all it did, was restarting 
base-install and failing again. A question whether I really 
want to skip preliminary steps would be more appropriate (at 
least in expert/low-priority mode).
BTW these question priorities can be somewhat confusing. I think 
most people understand when you talk about beginner/advanced/
expert mode but probably misunderstand low/medium/high priority 
questions...

Regards,
Stefan





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