[5358] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Athena 9.4 Installer
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Garrett E Barter)
Thu Nov 3 17:46:21 2005
Message-ID: <436A9335.4030303@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 03 Nov 2005 17:46:13 -0500
From: Garrett E Barter <gbarter@MIT.EDU>
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To: Bill Cattey <wdc@mit.edu>
CC: release-team@mit.edu
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Bill,
Our new computers were 3 x Dell Dimension 5100 + 1 x Dell Dimension 5150.
Both of these computers use an ICH7 chipset, which outdated the Athena
installer and even our RHEL4 install CD. This created the following
problems:
1. Installer did not recognize onboard network card.
Solution: Used temporary PCI network card during install, removed at
end.
2. Installer did not recognize our SATA hard drives.
Solution #1 for Dimension 5100: Set "SATA Operation" in BIOS to
legacy for install. This allowed the installer to treat the SATA drives
like normal IDE hard drives (i.e. /dev/hda). However, after the upgrade
to the new kernel, it recognizes the SATA drives and therefore loads the
drive as /dev/sda. We had to use device labels in our fstab and
grub.conf files.
Solution #2 for Dimension 5150 (above option was not available):
installed temporary IDE hard drive for install, imaged partitions to
SATA drive at the end. This option is tricky when it comes to
configuring grub correctly.
3. After the install of Athena 9.3 and the upgrade to Athena 9.4, the
new kernel was able to recognize the chipset and SATA devices. However,
on reboot we received a kernel panic that it could not load the root
partition! This threw us for a loop for a while and the problem was
replicated in RHEL4 when upgrading from the 2.6.9-5 kernel to the
2.6.9-11 kernel. Eventually, we discovered via Google that the SATA
drivers must be compiled directly into the initrd boot image.
Therefore, after the upgrade to Athena 9.4 and before the reboot, we
used the following command:
mkinitrd -v -f --preload=sd_mod --preload=ata_piix --preload=ide-scsi \
/boot/initrd-2.6.9-11.EL.img 2.6.9-11.EL
and the same for our SMP kernel.
Hope this was clear and helpfull,
Garrett
Bill Cattey wrote:
> Ideally we would have gotten back to you sooner.
> What exactly did you end up doing? If another customer comes in with
> the same problem before we update the installer, we can at least give
> them your work-around.
>
> -wdc
>
> On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 17:14 -0500, Garrett E Barter wrote:
>
>>Hi Bill,
>>
>>Thanks for the reply. Between temporarily swapping in alternate
>>hardware and many Google searches, we found a way to get Athena onto our
>>machines.
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Garrett
>>
>>
>>Bill Cattey wrote:
>>
>>>I was going through old mail. Did anyone get back to you on this issue?
>>>
>>>Upgrading the Athena install to be based on a 2.6 kernel has been in our
>>>queue to do for some time. Unfortunately, there are too many tasks and
>>>not enough people.
>>>
>>>It's an unfortunate situation where we had to put extra effort into
>>>making things stable for existing customers and customers using hardware
>>>we've qualified before we could do work for new customers with the
>>>latest hardware requiring a refresh of our installer.
>>>
>>>We had a LOT of trouble this year with instability of AFS under the 2.6
>>>kernel. That sucked up a lot of our time and energy. With that behind
>>>us, we hope to begin working on an update to the installer Real Soon
>>>Now.
>>>
>>>-wdc
>>>
>>>On Fri, 2005-09-30 at 18:15 -0400, Garrett E Barter wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>Hello,
>>>>
>>>>We perform system administration for a lab with many Linux-Athena
>>>>workstations for its students. We recently ordered some new machines
>>>>and our Athena install was foiled because of unsupported hardware (new
>>>>SATA controllers, network card chipset, etc). The Athena install CD is
>>>>based off of RHEL3 and the 2.4 Kernel and is quite old. What is the
>>>>timeline for upgrading the installer in the bootkit locker to RHEL4 and
>>>>the 2.6 kernel? Alternatively, is there another way we can install
>>>>Athena? IS&T deploys new Athena cluster machines often- there must be
>>>>an updated installer available somewhere.
>>>>
>>>>Many thanks for your help,
>>>>ACDL admins
