Does anyone reuse /boot or /var partitions ?

[Stijn Hoop]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2015 09:26:34 -0800
Adam Williamson <adamwill at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2015-01-22 at 13:36 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> > There's a proposed anaconda patch ATM which would disallow mounting 
> > an existing partition as /boot or /var (or any subdirectory of
> > those except /var/www ) without reformatting it. i.e., you can't
> > reuse an existing partition with those mountpoints.
> 
> OK, OK, you can (mostly) stop panicking now: David is back to trying 
> to fix the initramfs re-generation problem:
> 
> https://lists.fedorahosted.org/pipermail/anaconda-patches/2015-January/015699.html

I know it's a bit late, but still: at my previous $JOB we put a
bootloader entry in GRUB that kickstarts the system from scratch,
preserving some key stuff from the old install.

The kernel + initrd for that were stored in /boot, along with some
(smaller) temporary stuff that needed to be saved (SSH host key, etc).
The kickstart script used (from over the network) preserved this /boot
so as to be able to copy things back in the post kickstart scripts.

For this usecase, it's all good if the interactively started anaconda
refuses a non-formatted /boot but it would be useful to keep this while
kickstarting. And of course there's loads of workarounds such as
copying stuff over the network instead of storing it locally.

So workaroundable, but still it intrudes on the usecase. I guess it's up
to the anaconda developers whether it's a sane one :-)

Regards,

--Stijn