Karanbir Singh wrote:
Bill Campbell wrote:
How was I using the wrong tool when I was testing a
kickstart configuration
file in interactive mode, which I figured would be safe as
it would allow
me to exit before it wrote on the disk? I have done
similar testing of
autoyast configuration files on many occassions without clobbering anything.
anaconda-kickstart does not have a simulation mode. it might have been well worth the time to investigate that before trying it out :) assumption is dangerous. But then I suppose at this stage you might point to me and say hindsight is an exacting science. Its always easier to say what one might have or should have done.
virtual machine technology is fairly far along the road to stability, thats always a good option when testing such stuff.
Also, when you say interactive mode - what exactly do you mean by that ? because Anaconda has two modes, Interactive and Kickstart scripted. And as already been pointed out, you can skip portions out of the kickstart ( its quite common to see the drive partitioning logic commented out so that the person on $console might be able to do that himself ), and anaconda will ask you about those questions. But you cant really have a complete interactive install session and also have a kickstart script running alongside.
I would hardly call it venting. I've made a serious effort
not to say some
of the things that come to mind (particularly when I found
that not only
had it nuked my hard drive, but also nuked the external USB
drive that
ok thats interesting. by default anaconda should not touch the drives its not creating partitions on. Unless you expressly tell it to. did /var/log/anaconda.log, /root/anaconda-ks.cfg, /root/*.log have anything interesting to say about why it might have nuked that other drive as well ?
Well actually there is the kickstart option 'clearpart --all'.
If one specifies a 'clearpart -all' without specifying which drives then I believe the result is all partitions from all drives.
Definitely a VERY dangerous option, I would say that that should have been clearly stated in the RHEL docs.
I can sympathise with your situation Bill, but one should test carefully these scripted installs first either on a Xen VM or VMware VM, or on a bare-bones system that hasn't been customized yet.
If you want a descructive install may I recommend at least using 'clearpart --linux' which only wipes Linux partitions.
-Ross
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