FAI dying during partition setup

[Ryan Steele]

Ryan Steele wrote:
> 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...

FYI, I fixed this problem by adding lvm2 and mdadm to the client's 
package list.  Without them, update-initramfs couldn't add lvm support 
to the initrd image.  Everything seems to work now :)