[CentOS] Three Identical systems - short cut to setting up the drives?

Sun Jul 6 19:28:50 UTC 2008
William L. Maltby <CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com>

On Sun, 2008-07-06 at 11:04 -0400, Filipe Brandenburger wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 6:36 AM, William L. Maltby
> <CentOS4Bill at triad.rr.com> wrote:
> >> > If it's a boot drive, remember to rebuild your initrd and modify the
> >> > init file to ignore lvm lock failures with the new VG name. Otherwise
> >> > you'll be fighting some more battles.
> >>
> >> Yes, I remember getting burned by this once.
> >
> > Man gzip and cpio in case I misremember.
> 
> To set the "ignorelockingfailure" and others on the initrd file, can't
> you just use "mkinitrd"? I was looking into the /sbin/mkinitrd script
> (on CentOS 5.2), and I saw that it contains code for that, for
> instance:
> 
> if [ -n "$vg_list" ]; then
>     emit "echo Scanning logical volumes"
>     emit "lvm vgscan --ignorelockingfailure"
>     emit "echo Activating logical volumes"
>     emit "lvm vgchange -ay --ignorelockingfailure $vg_list"
> fi
> 
> I just don't know if vg_list will be populated with the right devices.
> Anyway, it might be worth a try, specially if you want to do that over
> and over again, messing with the internals of initrd (gzip, cpio,
> etc., and specially rebuilding it) is not something you would want to
> do on a daily basis.

He is trying to copy an existing install, transport the drive and boot.
Until he gets a boot that allows the new root to be detected *as* the
new root, I don't know if that would work. But as I frequently say, I'm
not expert at any of this stuff.

However, I can tell you that this lets me keep a fallback on a second
drive in case the first fails or gets scrogged by you-know-who. It is
tested and works. 1. Change BIOS boot sequence *if* required 2. Root
file system on 2nd drive is VolGroupAA 3. Punch magic button. 4. Back in
business.

> 
> HTH,
> Filipe
> <snip>

-- 
Bill