FAI setup for BeeGFS with ZFS, Re: Use of /dev/disk/by-path/... in disk_config?

[Steffen Grunewald]

Hi,

On Fri, 2018-01-19 at 17:37:38 +0100, Thomas Lange wrote:
> >>>>> On Fri, 19 Jan 2018 16:34:33 +0100, Steffen Grunewald <steffen.grunewald at aei.mpg.de> said:
> 
>     > Bad news: I just learned that the systems will get CentOS installed.
>     > While there's still an option to replace the system disks, and run 
>     > another installation (Debian 9 via FAI) I'm afraid that will void
>     > our warranty.
> You get warranty when running CentOS on hardware? Normally the vendors
> wants you to run RHEL to get warranty.
> But you still can install CentOS using FAI ;-)

It turned out that Debian 9 was installed, something I'm more familiar with.
(We get support on the hardware if it got setup by one of the vendor's 
engineers - whether that would be void if I did my own config is left as
an exercise for the lawyers.)

Still, FAI doesn't seem to offer an option to handle unpartitioned disks to
be formatted as ext4 (I couldn't find any documentation involving "raw-disk"
except for md or lvm usage?), suggested for BeeGFS metadata storage.
Also, with multipath-tools not installable in the nfsroot (yet), the setup of
ZFS pools for the object storage had to be postponed until after the first
reboot (one may want to scan the JBOD and assign /dev/mapper/disk* aliases,
before creating zpools - those HGST boxes don't offer a lot of support for
the poor guy who's got to replace a failed disk, and /dev/sd* names seem to be
assigned in a rather random order).
So no, there's no consistent, FAI-only solution for setting up BeeGFS storage
on such hardware yet.
I'm afraid that the motivation to redo this setup is pretty small (never 
change...), thus there won't be anything useful from my side for the weeks
to come.

I apologize if that's bad news, but I didn't have time nor means to plan this
carefully to be fully done within FAI.


Cheers,
 Steffen