Boot-From-San

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). ...

Well, after I scripted the installation the other day, I tried installing SLES11.1-Updates to the freshly installed systems. Guess what ? The thing broke. Initially (it was late Friday afternoon - like 6 PM - before my one week vacation) I didn’t have much time to debug the issue, so I sat down last week and looked at the issue. During the installation, when first starting multipath via command line, the scsi-mpatha device appears, and each and every occurance of this is subsequentially being used (and other stuff replaced by this actually) during the whole installation phase. ...