disk_config on machines that contain a large number of disks & controllers

[Andreas Schuldei]

* thomas timpo (lundefinedl at yahoo.com) [081209 23:23]:
> 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? 

yes.
there are several problems involved:
- grub can only install stuff on the first 8 disks (in bios order)
  and the disk you try to install to might not be reachable for grub.
- the controllers can be detected in funny orders. in my case grub had 
  different perceptions of what the first disk at kernel run time and 
  boot time.

I could solve my problems by not loading the kernel module for the off-board 
controllers in the initrd (by both blacklisting it and loading it in /etc/modules).
that put the on board controller always first. furthermore i use UUIDs or LVM 
everywhere.