FAI dying during partition setup

[Ryan Steele]

Michael Tautschnig wrote:
>> Recently, I've been trying to set up LVM clients with FAI 3.2.4 for  
>> Ubuntu, using Peter Gervai's well-placed LVM hooks.  However, I keep  
>> hitting the situation where sfdisk cannot read the partition table, and  
>> mke2fs cannot create a filesystem, because it thinks the device is in  
>> use.  It's reproducible every time if I FAI-install the client more than  
>> once.  E.g., the first time I FAI-install the LVM-enabled host, it  
>> works.  But then, if I try it again (with the exact same disk_config),  
>> sfdisk and mke2fs drop me to an emergency shell.  I would guess it's  
>> because it's unable to get the kernel to re-read the partition table  
>> without a reboot, but I'm really not sure how FAI can get around that  
>> situation, as there is currently no method for having FAI "pick up where  
>> it left off" right after writing the partition table.
>>
>> Has anybody else encountered this?  It really makes FAI unusable.   
>> Here's the output from FAI when this happens (from fai.log).  /dev/sda2  
>> was my LVM volume:
>>
>>     
>
> Would it be possible to upgrade your fai packages to 3.2.10? These packages
> include a proper version of setup-storage (see also
> http://faiwiki.debian.net/index.php/Setup-storage), which should be able to
> satisfy all your needs.
>
> Best,
> Michael
>
>   
I adapted the 3.2.10 Lenny packages for my Hardy distribution, and 
almost have it working.  However, during boot (after the FAI 
installation), I get dropped in to the initramfs emergency shell.  It 
didn't take long for me to realize that there was no /dev/mapper, so 
dm_mod must not be in the initrd generated by FAI.  Which is strange, as 
FAI specifies dm-mod in 20-hwdetect.source.  Maybe I'll just have to 
generate another one with mkinitramfs manually...