[CentOS] Kickstart install surprise

Karanbir Singh mail-lists at karan.org
Wed Sep 12 23:23:15 UTC 2007


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 ?


-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq



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