Oracle: Unbreak my Linux Heart

If you do an installation of a Linux server over the network (called a "network install"), you'll save yourself a lot of time: you don't need to change CDs. You can also automate installation with a so-called "scripted install" using a kickstart file. This will get you an "unattended installation". A sample file anaconda-ks.cfg is saved in /root at the end of every manual install. You can use that as a starting point to create your own. When doing a network installation of Linux, you can tell Linux to use the kickstart file using a range of options . Please check the Red Hat docs for your favorite options. How do you do a network installation when booting from a CD (or PXE server)? Simple! Insert CD 1, or mount that image through DRAC or iLO, at boot the machine. At the first command line of the boot CD type: linux ks=http://server/path/kickstart_file.cfg url=http://server/path For instance, linux ks=ftp://myserver/default-ks.cfg url=ftp://myserv...

I tried to image our Linux servers, taking a "golden image" from one of our bare metal servers. I wanted to have a quick restore available in case I seriously cripple a serever during testing. In earlier runs, the restore worked but the Linux image had become unusable. GRUB wouldn't produce anything beyond its first 4 letters, so I created another server and imaged that. Same thing... Turns out I am using a Dell Poweredge 2950 with a local disk in RAID1 (mirror). I only use the local disk as swap area, creating a big LVM Volume Group (VG) on it called VGinternal. The actual boot disk is a LUN on the SAN. It also uses LVM and I have a VG in the LUN called VGsystem. VGsystem holds the actual system partitions /, /var and /tmp. When Altiris images this, it uses raw mode to capture the LVM partitions. Upon deploying the image containing LVM disk info, you must tell the DS to use the Linux environment . Not the WinPE or DOS modes... Testing it later...

The Register reports: "Oracle's assault on Linux looks to take the shape of a fork in the near future, according to Canonical founder and Ubuntu chief Mark Shuttleworth. 'They must be on track to fork soon,' he told us, during an interview here at OSCON. 'They are hiring too many people just to deliver patches. My assumption is that they are on track to fork and build their own distribution.'"

In order to use the Dell QLE2460 HBA to boot from SAN, you need to have the latest Dell BIOS (v.1.3.7 at the time of writing) and the HBA needs to be at firmware level v1.24. BTW, we are booting from an EMC DMX SAN beast. Your mileage may vary with other SANs. The qlogic 2460 firmware v1.24 can be found in their driver package v1.56, FYI.

If you, like me, love LVM for your Linux installations and LVM's ability to add disk space to partitions before they fill up without reboot or unmounting... then you'll be glad to know you can also use LVM if you have EMC PowerPath for your multi-path issues. In a bug fix from 2005, rhn.redhat.com | Red Hat Support , Red Hat lists that you can use Powerpath pseudo-devices with LVM. That way, LVM is unaware of a path failure and will get the fail-over path from PowerPath. Update: What you should do, though, is tell LVM to ignore local devices and only focus on emcpower devices. I distinguish between VMs and bare metal (BM) servers that also have local SAS disks. Here is what I've put in the lvm.conf file: # add EMCpower devices and sdb, reject all other SCSI disks and any CDs #BM#filter = [ "a|/dev/emcpower.*|","a|/dev/sdb|","r|/dev/sd.*|","r|/dev/cd.*|" ] # add any SCSI devices, reject all IDE disks and CDs #VM#filter...

I had another issue with Dell's Poweredge 2950 and the combination on Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) 4 update 5 (4U5), qlogic 2460 single port HBAs and an EMC DMX SAN. I was trying to install a Linux server to boot from SAN... It seems be caused by Dell's BIOS and Linux device enumeration, about which I've reported earlier. Dell uses DRAC to service its servers remotely. Using DRAC, you can mount virtual devices: a floppy and/or a CD (image). With these, you can install driver updates, install an OS or apply updates to a machine as if you're sitting directly with them. Very handy, but... These virtual media get recognized as USB/SCSI devices, or so it seems, and this causes Linux to assign device names to them, just like ordinary (SCSI) disks. In my case, the Dell Virtual Floppy gets enumerated as /dev/sda , which bumps up the internal PERC controller and my QLogic HBA. This results in a boot drive letter change from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb or sdb to sdc . Therefore, you...

The docs on Red Hat Network Installations can also be applied to Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL)... Easily. Just make sure that you may have to edit the file TRANS.TBL in Enterprise/RPMS . You can also use Altiris to setup a Linux ftp deployment server. Just boot the OEL cd with the prompt: linux askmethod Then, the OEL CD image will ask you if you'd like to use the CD-ROM or opt for an NFS, ftp or http install source. Before you hit the OK key, make sure that the local CD image disk 1 is unmounted . If you don't, the network install will fail and you'll see the file product.img appearing in your logs. Try again, this unmount the boot CD image from which you started and then hit OK to start the network install. This fixed all my problems (after several hours).