setup-storage!!!! :)

[Joseph Rawson]

I've been spending the last couple of weeks in an attempt to try to get the 
debian-installer to run in a chrooted environment on a regular system.  That 
didn't work, so I tried making a deb package out of the partman udebs, and 
was only moderately successful there.  I've even tried to hack around in 
ubiquity, which was also a painful experience.  What I wound up doing was 
looking at anaconda, and I thought I might have better luck there, but I was 
sadly mistaken.  I spent a lot of time and effort fooling around with this, 
and I finally decided to see if you were doing anything about lvm and raid.

I was surprised to see that you have a setup-storage script now! :)  I've been 
using your setup-harddisks script for a long time, as fooling with 
partitioning and formatting filesystems can be really messy work, and I don't 
really like trying to re-invent the wheel in this area.  I'm really hoping 
that setting up the environment and config files will be similar to the way I 
did it for the setup_harddisks script. 

Here's how I've been doing it:
I make the config file here - 
http://svn.berlios.de/wsvn/paella/trunk/src/paella/db/machine/main.py (in the 
make_disk_config_info member)

Then I reference the file here -
http://svn.berlios.de/wsvn/paella/trunk/src/paella/installer/util/disk.py (in 
the setup_disk_fai function)

That makes the command that I run from the installer.

Since there's more than one file now, I'm probably going to just get the 
installer to depend on the fai-client package, instead of copying all the 
files.

Please let me know if there's anything that's really important that I may not 
be aware of.  I've been looking at the disk_config directory, and it looks 
like the config files have changed a bit.  I'm going to be rewriting my code, 
and setting this up pretty soon.

I was wondering if y'all think that using partman would be a more permanent 
solution to the problem of setting up the disks.  At the moment, it's tied in 
very heavily with the debian installer environment, and it's difficult to 
extricate it from that environment, or even to run it from a chroot.  I know, 
I've been spending the last couple of weeks trying to get it to do this.  The 
people working on live-helper would also like to see the debian-installer 
usable from a regular debian system, instead of the restrictive busybox 
environment that it's made to work with.

The way that the debian installer is set up, it would only take a preseed file 
to get the disks partitioned and readied for an install.  And there is 
already support for preserving certain partitions, while formatting the 
others.  I think that having the partman package running on debian as a 
normal package, or packages, would be a very valuable tool.  If y'all are 
interested in this, I'd be very happy to help with it.

Thanks again for all the work that you've put into fai.  This program has 
inspired what I've been doing for a long time now! :)


-- 
Thanks:
Joseph Rawson
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