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

[Michael Tautschnig]

> 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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