Thursday, November 06, 2008

F10-beta Error Kickstarting VM

Here's a tremendously perplexing bug. When attempting to kickstart a VM install from the command line, the kickstart dies with any error that it can not read from /dev/sdb.

First oddity is a warning that "The partition table on device sdb was unreadable" and needed to be initialized. This message has always been a anomoly solved by simply responding "Yes". Unfortunately, this time it is for a non-existent /dev/sdb.

After a too long delay, the second warning states "Input/output error during write on /dev/sdb" with the options of Retry / Ignore / Cancel. When I ignore, Anaconda throws exception 11.3.0.50 for KeyError: 'sdb'.

For some reason, virt-install was reserving 3876 MB of disk space for an sdb partition, but not creating the sdb1.

A dozen attempts at a kickstart %pre work around later, broke for dinner, and watched a free HD OnDemand Bond movie (Dalton). When I walk back to the system, the kicktart had worked. It turns out, this time, the kickstart worked. This one, however, was executed via the gui wizard. I examined the log files, and found the difference.

Doesn't work:
virt-install -n vinci -r 256 -f /dev/img/vm02f8
-l /vinf/ISO/Fedora-8-x86_64-DVD.iso -b virbr1
-x "ks=ftp://192.168.169.13/ks/vinci.cfg"

Works:
virt-install -n vinci -r 256 -f /dev/img/vm02f8
-l ftp://192.168.169.13/f8-64 -b virbr1
-x "ks=ftp://192.168.169.13/ks/vinci.cfg"

Can you see the difference? Look at -l. The first (bad) is attempting a local install from an ISO. The second (good) is using an extracted image via FTP.

Now the sad part: I can't report it as a bug, since I can't solve the problem. I do however have a work around, which moves me forward. It doesn't help the developer's with their code problems, but then I'm not a programmer.

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