We routinely rebuild systems from a kickstart driven facility we have
built. This uses a Fedora image - in this case fedora 7 Everything with
the updates merged in. We have run into 2 problems with this as opposed
to the original release image. First the version of yum available in updates currently is incompatible with the version of anaconda. The problem is that this version of yum does not create the headers directory and anaconda assumes it will exist. anaconda-11.2.0.66-1.i386.rpmTo get round this we have reverted to yum-3.2.0-1.fc7.noarch.rpm for now but will probably try out the development releases of anaconda and yum next week. More worrying is a problem with dependencies in building the kernel initrd images. The newly built Everything regime has the latest kernel - kernel-2.6.21-1.3228.fc7 - as available from updates. But when the kickstart install runs the mkinitrd cannot find /sbin/mdadm as the mdadm package is not a dependency of the kernel (and should not be for all builds but ....[1]) This has the effect of allowing the build to complete but when the system reboots LVM cannot find the logical volume groups because the raid has not started. We build our systems with mirrored boot partitions on /dev/md0 and mirrored /dev/md1 on the remainder of the disc with logical volumes on this portion of the disc including the root partition. Hence the problem above.[1]To get round this we are rebuilding the kernel to require the mdadm package - but this is really not what we should be doing. Somewhere in the RPM, YUM, Anaconda, regime we need to be able to specify that mdadm (and lvm2) needs to be installed prior to the kernel installation, only for our particular configurations not in general. Any ideas anybody? --
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