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Package: debian-installer
Version: 2007.03.10 snapshot
Severity: normal
I've installed recently Debian etch on my machine with idstaller snapshot
from 2007.03.10. Generally, everything is fine and system working ok, but
I've experienced two problems during installation.
I've used standard installation mode and partitioned HDD-s the following
way:
/dev/sda (SATA) -> /dev/sda1 -\ /- LVM 1 -> ext3 (/)
/dev/sdb (SATA) -> /dev/sdb1 -> software RAID5 -> LVM <
/dev/sdc (SATA) -> /dev/sdc1 -/ \- LVM 2 ->
-> crypto -> xfs (/storage)
/dev/sdd (USB) drive used to boot installer
/dev/sde (USB) -> /dev/sde1 -> ext3 (/boot)
(hope this picture looks good enough)
So, the first problem was to make a RAID5 array. I've
partitioned /dev/sd{a,b,c} to have one partition for the whole drive, set
it as "physical storage for RAID" (or how it's called in installer, sorry,
can't remember exact name now), went to RAID configuration, saved changes
and it just said that I have no partitions of type "Linux RAID autodetect".
That surprised me, I've checked physical partitions several times,
repartitioned them, tried different things but had no luck. Then I've just
switched to the shell, ran fdisk on every drive and saw partitions had
type "83" which is just "Linux". I've fixed them manually with fdisk to
have type "fd", "Linux RAID autodetect" and only then I was able to set up
software RAID on this three partitions in installer.
LVM setup went fine and then I've made a mistake when setting up crypto
physical storage. Originally I had a plan to use two-factor authentication
(passworded key file), but as installer has no support for this yet, I've
tried to use "random key" option thinking it would give me an option to use
key file. I've realized I've a mistake when installer said that its
intended to use for swap area, crypting it with different key on every
boot. OK, but how do I change crypto settings for a given volume? I've
tried to delete partition on crypto volume, that works fine, leaving it
with "FREE SPACE", but there is no way to delete crypto volume itself!
Tried to delete LVM volume, but that doesn't work too because LVM volume is
used for crypto volume, so it's busy. I've found no way to solve this and
just rebooted installer.
I've used USB flash (no CD on machine, actually no monitor/keyboard either,
but 'console=ttyS0,115200n8' worked absolutely fine) to boot installer and
thought of making machine boot from USB too, because all the hard drives
here are assembled in RAID5 array and I see no way to boot machine from
RAID5 (maybe I'm wrong and GRUB solves this somehow), so I've tried to set
up another USB flash as /boot partition to boot machine from there and
maybe set up this flash to contain crypto key later. Well, I didn't expect
that this setup will work out of the box, so no surprises here - it doesn't
work. :) So I had to manually reinstall GRUB on flash on another machine,
fix (hd4,0) reference to (hd0,0) and then it worked fine.
Although on boot system complained about not being able to fsck /boot as it
moved from /dev/sde1 to /dev/sdd1 (disconnected flash used to boot
installer), but that's no big deal, fixed in fstab and will try to setup
udev properly for this.
Well, that's my experience on Debian etch install. Anything else works
absolutely fine, hope this helps fix RAID/crypto (don't think anyone cares
about USB /boot that much) issues before release.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-4-amd64
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
--
Roman
http://roman.khimov.ru .o.
mailto: roman@khimov.ru ..o
gpg --keyserver hkp://subkeys.pgp.net --recv-keys 0xE5E055C3 ooo
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