FAI 3.2.10 - Etch.

[Fortier,Vincent [Montreal]]

> -----Message d'origine-----
> De : Michael Tautschnig [mailto:mt at debian.org] 
> Envoyé : 10 octobre 2008 05:58
> 
> [...]
> > Executing: vgdisplay --units m -s
> > Command vgdisplay --units m -s had exit code 5
> That one is really really strange already...
> 
> > 
> > While investigating I've found this:
> > # pvremove -ff -y /dev/sda3
> > /etc/lvm/.cache: open failed: Permission denied
> > /var/lock/lvm: mkdir failed: Permission denied Locking type 1 
> > initialisation failed.
> > 
> > # echo $?
> > 5
> > 
> I'm really really puzzled with this one.
> 
> > This seems to be only happening on a specific workstation that I had 
> > previously installed using 3.2.9 version of FAI (although I might had 
> > been using static disks instead of LVM at the time).  This config 
> > using 3.2.10 runs smoothly everywhere else... So I just don't get it.
> > 
> > Help appreciated!
> > 
> > NOTE: Could similar bug be fixed in 3.2.11 ? Or 3.2.12 SVN ?
> > 
> No, not really, because I can't seem to see the problem 
> inside setup-storage :-)

Got it!  Actually it was more obvious than expected.  It's mainly du to the /etc/lvm/lvm.conf file.

My exports are set to read-only mode therefore it is impossible to to write from the client on the NFS share provided by the server... Hence, LVM cannot create it's cache and lock files.  Changing theses on my nfsroot fixed it:

devices {
	cache = "/tmp/lvm/.cache"

global {
	locking_dir = "/tmp/lvm/lock"

Using /tmp makes it writable to LVM and solves the problem right away!

Note that while testing at some point I had to reset the drive using:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=512 count=1

Now the proper fix would be that theses parameters gets changed automatically while creating the nfsroot.

- vin