[Sisuite-devel] using UYOK

[Mark Seger]

I should probably know better but I don't, even though I've been using
SystemImager for a very long time and now I'm faced with a kernel that
can't see my hard drive and so need to get UYOK working. The
documentation implied that it just worked yet SI insists on loading
BusyBox. Is there some manual step I need to do in which to tell the it
to load MY kernel and initrd instead of BusyBox?
-mark

[Mark Seger]

It's coming back to me, because I'm pretty sure I had gotten this to
work at one time... I put a hard link in my /tftpboot directory to the
images in /usr/share/systemimager/boot/x86_64/myimage/kernel and
initrd.img and verified those files listed in /tftpboot are indeed the
same size.
Then I booted and once again I see BusyBox so what I'd line to know is
where it even came from! Furthermore when I do ls /dev I don't even see
sda, which I know is there.
-mark

Post by Mark Seger
I should probably know better but I don't, even though I've been using
SystemImager for a very long time and now I'm faced with a kernel that
can't see my hard drive and so need to get UYOK working. The
documentation implied that it just worked yet SI insists on loading
BusyBox. Is there some manual step I need to do in which to tell the
it to load MY kernel and initrd instead of BusyBox?
-mark

[Andrea Righi]

Post by Mark Seger
I should probably know better but I don't, even though I've been using
SystemImager for a very long time and now I'm faced with a kernel that
can't see my hard drive and so need to get UYOK working. The
documentation implied that it just worked yet SI insists on loading
BusyBox. Is there some manual step I need to do in which to tell the it
to load MY kernel and initrd instead of BusyBox?
-mark

Mark,

probably you misunderstand something... UYOK is a kernel, BusyBox is a
set of unix utilities in userspace. Both the standard BOEL and UYOK
kernels use BusyBox to create a UNIX environment into the initrd.img, so
in practice you must always see the BusyBox shell.

But let's focus on the real problem: you don't see your /dev/sda. Do you
know which particular disk controller is installed in your client?

Anyway, I would suggest to try also the BOEL kernel from SI 4.0.2 and
re-create the autoinstall script with --autodetect-disks.

-Andrea

[Mark Seger]

good news adn bad news...

The good news is this worked fine without yuok, which makes me wonder
what was so different in this version that it could see the disks and
the older, 3.8.1 couldn't - I'd think that's pretty basic stuff. Anyhow
I'm not going to worry about it if you're not. I'm happy...

now the bad news - after my system rebooted it started to reimage again
and si_netbootmond IS running. I then took a look in /var/log/messages
and saw the following:

Dec 19 11:12:09 cag-dl380-01 kernel: application bug: rsync(17523) has
SIGCHLD set to SIG_IGN but calls wait().
Dec 19 11:12:09 cag-dl380-01 kernel: (see the NOTES section of 'man 2
wait'). Workaround activated.

so I'm guessing the successful termination message netbootmond is
looking for isn't there! In any event I did escape out of the network
boot when the system tried to come back up and it did boot successfully
so we in fact have installed a good image, but this also means it's
going to always try to install a new image unless I clean up the problem
with rsync. Has anyone seen this before? Might it be possible for the
installation script to write its own message into the messages file
rather than rely on rsync? Just a thought...

As another comment, I'm using a pretty old system for imaging - don't
laugh, but it's RH9 and has been working just fine for SI and I guess
we've been do dependent on SI we've been afraid to upgrade it.

-mark.

Post by Andrea Righi

Post by Mark Seger
I should probably know better but I don't, even though I've been using
SystemImager for a very long time and now I'm faced with a kernel that
can't see my hard drive and so need to get UYOK working. The
documentation implied that it just worked yet SI insists on loading
BusyBox. Is there some manual step I need to do in which to tell the it
to load MY kernel and initrd instead of BusyBox?
-mark

Mark,
probably you misunderstand something... UYOK is a kernel, BusyBox is a
set of unix utilities in userspace. Both the standard BOEL and UYOK
kernels use BusyBox to create a UNIX environment into the initrd.img, so
in practice you must always see the BusyBox shell.
But let's focus on the real problem: you don't see your /dev/sda. Do you
know which particular disk controller is installed in your client?
Anyway, I would suggest to try also the BOEL kernel from SI 4.0.2 and
re-create the autoinstall script with --autodetect-disks.
-Andrea

[Andrea Righi]

Post by Mark Seger
now the bad news - after my system rebooted it started to reimage again
and si_netbootmond IS running. I then took a look in /var/log/messages
Dec 19 11:12:09 cag-dl380-01 kernel: application bug: rsync(17523) has
SIGCHLD set to SIG_IGN but calls wait().
Dec 19 11:12:09 cag-dl380-01 kernel: (see the NOTES section of 'man 2
wait'). Workaround activated.

It seems a bug in rsync, have you seen this?
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=98740

I would suggest to use a more recent version of rsync.

Post by Mark Seger
As another comment, I'm using a pretty old system for imaging - don't
laugh, but it's RH9 and has been working just fine for SI and I guess
we've been do dependent on SI we've been afraid to upgrade it.

The bug above has been reported exactly on a RH9 system with
rsync-2.5.5-4... I'm quite sure you've found the same issue.

-Andrea