new kernel, old fai

[Paul Lussier]

Hi Folks,

For a variety of reasons I'm stuck using FAI 2.8.4, and I need to
update the kernel which is used during installation in order to deal
with new hardware we need to support.

A basic 2.6.18 kernel should be fine, and indeed, I've run the
hardware under such a kernel when manually installing the OS.

Now I need to get our crufty FAI configuration to do the same.  My
first thought was to use the latest fai-kernels package.  After some
tweaking to fai-setup and mak-fai-nfsroot to deal with this package, I
can in fact get my test FAI client to boot up using this 2.6.18
kernel.  (Note: the test FAI client is old, standard hardware, not the
new hardware I ultimately need to suppport).

Unfortunately, this kernel for some reason doesn't work as expected.
It can't find any of the hard drives in the system, which are standard
IDE/PATA drives. sfdisk -l and -s both return nothing.  I can still
install this client via FAI using my old 2.4.31 kernel, but I know for
a fact that *won't* work for the new hardware.

So, I'm curious about what I might have done incorrectly?  I can find
my FAI config area, /fai is there, I can see all my config files.
It's just that nothing works since the kernel can't find any drives.

I did notice that on the install client /lib/modules does not contain
a directory for the kernel currently running; 2.6.18-fai-kernels.
This seems strange, though, since I would expect this stage to require
a monolithic/non-modular kernel, it didn't concern me at first.

If the lack of a /lib/modules/<kernel version> hierarchy is indeed my
problem, how/where do I fix it?  I've run fai-setup -v and
make-fai-nfsroot -v several times, always ensuring that I restart the
nfs daemons on the server each time.  I'm stumped.

Thanks.

-- 
Seeya,
Paul