Tuesday, April 12, 2011

NoStorage and Kickstart - How to Specify Multiple HBA Modules

When kickstarting, you have the option of using 'nostorage' on the PXE command line to prevent storage HBA drivers from loading -- you can do the same to NICs, but it's not as interesting, not as common and the command line is dumber.
default linux
prompt 0
timeout 1
label linux
     kernel /images/centos55-x86_64/vmlinuz
     ipappend 2
     append initrd=/images/centos55-x86_64/initrd.img ksdevice=eth0 lang= kssendmac nostorage text ks=http://archive/cblr/svc/op/ks/system/Bish-PXETest
See that?  NoStorage.  Okay.

So what if you want to use the same kickstart for different machines?  For different HBAs ?  Normally you're screwed.  This won't work, either:
device scsi ahci
device scsi mptspi
device scsi cciss
Specifying the HBA drivers on multiple lines should work, but it's not that simple -- doing so makes it choose the first one and ignore every other invocation of the device line.  This does work, though:
device scsi ahci:mptspi:cciss
See the colons? There you go.  It allows/forces you to choose the order, so plan carefully.

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