Bill Campbell wrote:
On Thu, Sep 13, 2007, 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.
The kickstart configuration file and system-config-kickstart tool have an option for interactive kickstart installations, which I ass-u-me-d would work much the same way autoyast automatic installs do where I can abort the installation any time up to the point where it says start-install, do you really want to do this?
It does Bill, but the problem was that the partitioning wiping happened BEFORE the partition manager opened up and it happened successfully :-(
My approach to writing GUI sysadmin tools is to have the GUI collect the configuration parameters, then execute one or more command line tools to do the real work. One of the few things I really liked about AIX was that their SMIT tool displays the commands, and logs them as well which can be very useful to figure out what's going on under the hood. This is a bit easier than ``touching'' a file to create a timestamp, doing something with a GUI tool, the using ``find /etc -newer'' to figure out what the GUI tool is actually doing.
Most is done directly in Python these days, but a few things still are handled the goold ole way.
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 ?
That could be useful if I hadn't killed the install, only to find myself with two empty disks without partition tables.
I just finished reinstalling the system, and now installing all our OpenPKG based software on it. Doing this, I am reminded of something worth venting about -- the aliases on rm, mv, and cp to keep the children from doing dangerous things :-).
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn
Well there were enough complaints through the years to put in the child safety locks.
These are easily disabled though.
-Ross
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