Autoyast on BAFM

Loooong time

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:42:36 +0000

It’s been very quiet around here, I’ve been rather busy with my real life. During that busy time, a lot of things happened. I switched jobs starting on October 1st, I’m now working in Karlsruhe (as compared to the 870km northern Greifswald). It may sound far, but it’s actually quite pleasant. You know, I was born down here (well not exactly here – 70 kilometers afar) and I still had the feeling that this is my home.

SLES11 and AutoYaST

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:41:46 +0000

After the first week passed awfully quick, the last week I worked on refining the way on how we are doing openSuSE / SUSE Linux Enterprise Server installations. Up till now, they were done by hand (without a predefined schema) and were getting ugly to maintain. Working my way through the Novell documentation on AutoYaST was pretty straight forward, but the little details were getting hairy. So I decided to write them down, in case someone was gonna end up in the same situation like me.

Enabling multipathing in autoyast installations

Fri, 08 Aug 2014 08:30:46 +0000

As I mentioned before, we’re starting to utilize Boot-from-SAN as a means to strip the blades of their local disk. As the title says, after trying a manual installation of SLES 11.1 via CD/HTTP I wanted to automate the process, in order to get a reproducible, consistent installation method. As you might have figured, AutoYaST doesn’t have any built in support for configuring multipathing (hey, that’s what Novell says here). Now, they also provide a comprehensive how-to on how to “add” this to your AutoYaST, using a DUD (or D river U pdate D isk).

AutoYAST and custom swap partitioning

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:34:24 +0000

Well, we’ve been discussing our swap partitioning the last few days at work, and I finally got around to implementing it. Again, it proved to be kinda hard, basically because AutoYAST decides to do things differently.

SLES10 not installing boot loader in MBR

Thu, 03 Jun 2010 18:15:23 +0000

Well, as I mentioned in my earlier post, I had some trouble during the week. I was having issues with SLES10 installations not finishing during the bootloader installation phase. After trying out different flavors (as in 10SP2 x64/x86, …), and not having any luck with this, I went searching on Google as a last effort try. Guess what, yet again Google helped me out!

It was pretty simple. Putting /dev/cciss/c0d0 into /boot/grub/device.map as (hd0) made the grub-installer finish. Now, figuring out how to transfer those information during the installation proved difficult. I was just about to give up, while reading through the AutoYAST documentation, when it struck me. There is even an extra chapter for this stuff, so simply putting the following into my profile solved my issues:

Autoinstalling VMware-Tools

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:30:08 +0000

As I wrote before, I have been working on our AutoYaST setup. That entitles determining whether or not we’re currently inside a VMware environment. AutoYaST rules wise, that’s pretty easy (even though the MAC-tag is empty 😳):

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 <!-- Addons: Install VMware Tools / KMP -->
 <rule>
 <custom1>
 <script>
if ip a | grep "link/ether 00:50:56" >/dev/null ; then
 echo -n vmware
fi;
 </script>
 <match>*</match>
 <match_type>exact</match_type>
 </custom1>
 <result>
 <profile>addons/@custom1@.xml</profile>
 </result>
 </rule>

The hard part is figuring out ways, to make the VMware Tools installation as pain free as possible. One thing I can’t do, is running vmware-config-tools.pl …