Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 134669
Installation to machine with attached SAN storage problematic
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:07:13 EST
Description of problem: Problems when installing RHEL4 Beta to a machine that is seeing multiple LUNS. Novice system admin have been known to install the / partition to a SAN partition, overwriting very important data. However, even if a partition from the hard drive is installed to, grub.conf will be written incorrectly if the SAN storage is /dev/sda (aka, comes before the hard drive partitions scsi-wise). grub will reference sda thinking it is the "first scsi drive", and the machine won't boot after installation. Expected results: Given these two problems, I'd like to see all HBA drivers removed from the bootdisk/cdrom/pxe images. I don't believe that installing to a SAN is supported anyway.
Unfortunately, there isn't a clear delineation between what drivers are used for SANs and what are used for other things. People will use adapters which require the qlogic driver for internal disks (see a lot of IA64 boxes) With RHEL4, there is an attempt to make this somewhat better via the use of putting a small fingerprint in part of the partition table where nothing else is required to be. This area is then read in by the kernel at boot time when real mode is still present so that you can later map bios disk 0x80 to an actual disk and then I order disks using that instead of sda, sdb, ... If only hardware didn't suck, I'd do more :(