Ed Donahue wrote:

vi /etc/init.d

cahnge the number 5 to 3

reboot

fix driver

change the 3 to 5

reboot

or....

# telinit 3 # compile whatever # telinit 5

No reboot needed.

Jerry Geis wrote:

I was hoping to find an "automated" solution.

For these sorts of things, I compile the driver on a test system and push it out simultaneously with the new kernel.

Right now I only have to do this for VMWare's drivers, I build custom RPMs of the drivers and the tools and push them out when I push out a new kernel so I don't need to worry about this kind of thing.

[root@dc1-rhel5-32build001 ~]# rpm -qa | grep -i vmware VMWareToolsOnly-3.5.0-123630-1 VMWare-esx-guest-drivers-2.6.18_92.1.22.el5-1 [root@dc1-rhel5-32build001 ~]# rpm -qa | grep -i kernel kernel-2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 kernel-devel-2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 kernel-headers-2.6.18-92.1.22.el5

nate

Joseph L. Casale wrote:

...

Right now I only have to do this for VMWare's drivers, I build custom RPMs of the drivers and the tools and push them out when I push out a new kernel so I don't need to worry about this kind of thing.

That's a cool idea... Care to share those two spec files? :)

Sure though they aren't anything too special, I used alien to create them.

The drivers/tools are automatically installed as part of kickstart if vmware is detected. Snip from kickstart config(%post): cat <<EOF; ############################################################################### ## Install VMWare ESX Tools ## ############################################################################### EOF # These are custom RPMs

export CHECK_VMWARE=`/usr/local/sbin/searchdmi.sh VMware ; echo $?`

if [ $CHECK_VMWARE == 0 ]; then echo "VMware found!" chkconfig --level 12345 ntpd off; chkconfig --list ntpd; chkconfig --level 12345 smartd off; chkconfig --list smartd; rpm -Uvh --force --nodeps http://10.1.10.31/cfengine-rpms/vmware/ESX/3.5.0U3/tools/VMWareToolsOnly-3.5... rpm -Uvh --force http://10.1.10.31/cfengine-rpms/vmware/ESX/3.5.0U3/drivers/VMWare-esx-guest-... wget http://10.1.10.31/cfengine-rpms/vmware/ESX/3.5.0/tools/vmware_preinit.sh -O /etc/rc3.d/S15vmwareinit chmod 555 /etc/rc3.d/S15vmwareinit chown root.root /etc/rc3.d/S15vmwareinit else echo "VMware not found! (don't panic)" fi

I have it download an extra vmwareinit script, which I use to intialize vmware tools on initial boot a 2nd time, otherwise it doesn't appear to load right on first boot: --snip from script-- /etc/init.d/vmware-tools start

# Now I will delete myself rm -f /etc/rc3.d/S15vmwareinit --snip from script--

SPEC files are here: http://portal.aphroland.org/~aphro/specs/

3 of them: - drivers for i686 kernel (has a special %post to run depmod at the end otherwise vmxnet driver will not load properly upon reboot). Without vmxnet network performance can be significantly lower, though unless your doing bandwidth intensive things you may not notice(it took me almost a year to notice). - drivers for x86_64 kernel (no %post required as vmxnet doesn't run on x86_64, e1000 is used) - tools for both architectures - the %post detects what architecture is and sets the symlinks automatically. I stripped down the tools quite a bit to take out stuff I don't need (X11 support, binary kernel modules etc, the binary rpms are 7MB combined vs 36MB from the original VMware RPMS).

I'm sure there is a more proper way to go about doing it, the last time I looked into making a "real" RPM the process looked much more involved than I was willing to commit to, so alien works as a fine workaround for my needs(I use it to build probably 20 RPMs at the moment to push out for various purposes). I've been doing it this way for more than a year and it's worked great so far.

If I need to update the packages I put the updates in cfengine, so the servers can pull them down as needed. I don't use yum or other tools like that on a wide scale basis(I use them on a test server to stage the updates and then push the updates out through cfengine). I want a better system but not sure what the best choice would be, something that could work by itself to update but at the same time not conflict with cfengine and all of the packages that it pushes out. My cfengine config is roughly 12,000 lines so it's fairly in-depth, and works extremely well for my needs.

nate