> Hello, > > I have been working as QA Engineer on a team that is using FAI to deploy > linux clusters on a few hundred machines for testing. The machines that we > are experiencing this issue on have 3 or 4 disk controllers and 12 or more > disks. We are running into a problem where Fai decides to start installing > to a different disk. Because the bios is set to boot off of the disk on the > onboard disk controller, it will boot into the previous installation of > debian etch, while the new install will sit on some other disk, typically on > a different controller. Has anybody else experienced issues like this with > fai? >
The only option seems to use disk IDs (each drive has a (unique?) ID) that one may use to identify specific disks or groups of disks. You may want to give the experimental packages (see http://faiwiki.debian.net/index.php/Main_Page#getting_FAI) a try, these include some (still limited) support for disk IDs in setup-storage. To make use of this, instead of saying disk_config /dev/sda use disk_config /dev/disk/by-id/scsi-* (that is, you can use shell globbing). I have pretty much no idea what kind of names you will find in /dev/disk/by-id/, but I'd appreciate feedback about these, so we can extend the handling of that stuff, probably by extending to it to full perl regexps instead of shell globbing. Best, Michael
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