starting Fedora Server SIG

[Les Mikesell]

Chuck Anderson wrote:
> 
>> Once you have the machine in bootable condition with the right drivers  
>> connected to the available hardware, you need a way to interactively  
>> explore the new hardware without a gui, sort of like running 'fdisk -l'  
>> will enumerate the drives and current partitioning, but this tool has to  
>> be adapted to any new ways of describing mountable objects.  Similarly a  
> 
> blkid ?

What does that do for unformatted disks? If it reports an md device, how 
do I know that I shouldn't separately use the things it separately also 
reports that might be the underlying elements?  Same for lvm if it shows 
them, or lvm on top of md?

>> tool like mii-tool should enumerate your NICs and show which have link  
>> established - and any other useful information they can detect.  Then,  
> 
> ethtool ?

How do I enumerate the devices with ethtool?

>> once you understand the setup for any hardware type you need to be able  
>> to script it repeatably for any number of instances with a way to supply  
>> whatever variables it might need (i.e. mac addresses, UUID's, etc.).
>>
>> My objections to the changes in fedora are not so much related to any  
>> details of a change but that they aren't encompassed by scriptable text  
>> based tools that list and set the options or if those exist they are  
>> fragmented into a bunch of choices that have to match whatever anaconda  
>> did that you may not know about.
> 
> It probably wouldn't take too much to write a script around blkid and 
> ethtool to do this.

Don't forget these steps are already a level up from where we need to 
start.  We may be moving an installed system to one where the drivers 
don't match current hardware, or we may have added new NICs or disk 
controllers and have to get the appropriate drivers loaded.

And the scripts need to accommodate things that can't be enumerated too, 
like nfs/iscsi mounts and multiple vlans on an interface.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com