Topic: Multi HardDisks

[Kenneth]

Hello,

I was wondering if there is a way to have two hard disk drives under esmith (I haven't istalled it yet so maybe I could modify the setup program)

I have two [IDE] Maxtor 2.2 gig HDD

Thanx
Kenneth

[Gordon Rowell]

Kenneth wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I was wondering if there is a way to have two hard disk drives
> under esmith (I haven't istalled it yet so maybe I could modify
> the setup program)
>
> I have two [IDE] Maxtor 2.2 gig HDD

e-smith doesn't currently support multiple hard disks. However, you
can put a customised ks.cfg file on a floppy. The install.cfg and
upgrade.cfg files on the CD will show you what you need.

The other alternative is to just let e-smith install normally on one
hard disk and then manually mount the second hard disk as something
like /local by adding it to /etc/fstab

Gordon

[Carl Enset]

This is a response that I posted a week ago to the E-Smith forum.
I personally found the HOWTO mentioned very useful.

----
A complete "hack" solution to this problem is what I did with my firewall (the 4 betas installed ok, the release version choked).

That was to temporary replace the small hard drive(s) with a spare large drive that I had laying around, and perform the installation onto the "big" disk. Then transfer the files across to the smaller hard drive(s) as per the Hard-Disk-Upgrade HOWTO.

http://www.linuxdoc.org/HOWTO/mini/Hard-Disk-Upgrade/
(http://www.linuxdoc.org/mirrors.html)

There are probably better solutions to this problem, though for me this was a quick (and dirty) solution that allowed me to split the system across multiple partitions and drives and set the partition sizes to the values that I desired.  An added benefit was that after the transfer I was able to burn a CD-R with the 100 meg tar file that contained a full operational setup with my particular settings and customizations.

[Kenneth]

Hello Again

So if I wanted to use the ks.cfg method to use multi-HDDs, how do I go about doing it?
Could you give me a clear description (I hate being such a newbie)

Kenneth

[Geoff Bennion]

I have installed e-smith onto custom partitions ( should work for multi drives )

It requires altering the Boot-Up Floppy.

On the floppy disk ( rawrite boot.img A: ) edit the syslinux.cfg file
 -  Use a Unix Compatable Editor
Change the following lines :

  APPEND ks=cdrom:/images/kickstart/install.cfg initrd=initrd.img local
  APPEND ks=cdrom:/images/kickstart/upgrade.cfg initrd=initrd.img local upgrade

To Read :

  APPEND ks=floppy:/install.cfg initrd=initrd.img local
  APPEND ks=floppy:/upgrade.cfg initrd=initrd.img local upgrade

Now alter upgrade.cfg and install.cfg and comment out (using #'s ) the following lines

zerombr yes
clearpart --all
part /boot --size 10
part / --size 1 --grow
part swap --size 256

So they look like this

#zerombr yes
#clearpart --all
#part /boot --size 10
#part / --size 1 --grow
#part swap --size 256

Now boot using this floppy.

The install program will then prompt you for your own specifications for the partition details.

You will need :

Mount Point : /
Min Size (approx 300mb - can work with less - NOT recommended)

Mount Point : /boot
Min Size (approx 20mb - again can work with less - NOT recommended)

Swap File
Depends on amount of RAM installed, I recommend that RAM + SWAP > 192

If you want you can do seperate partitions for /usr and /home
/home is where all your i-bays, user files etc... go

Hope this helps.
If you want I could send you an image of the install floppy.

Geoff.

[Kenneth]

Hello,

Thanks for the help. I did it the kickstart way. I also found a howto at the Linuxdocumentation project that tells you what KS scripts do.

I think that e-smith should offer an advanced option (it doesn't look to hard to do-just edit the syslinux.cfg file) to setup linux the normal way (without kickstart scripts)
What do you think e-smith?

Kenneth Kowalsky
______________________
www.webconceptdesign.com

[Damien Curtain]

Geoff Bennion wrote:

> Now alter upgrade.cfg and install.cfg and comment out (using
> #'s ) the following lines

no point editing the upgrade file, partition info is ignored in upgrades

> Mount Point : /boot
> Min Size (approx 20mb - again can work with less - NOT
> recommended)

not recommened by who? set /boot to 10meg, anything above this is a waste of disk space.

--
 Damien

[Sasha Malic]

I have been adding extra drives to e-smith by mounting them under
...ibays/ibayname/files/

This allows you to manage permissions through the manager.

Simply create an ext2 partition on a running system and then create the mount point
in fstab.

The downside is that the entire drive is then only available under the one ibay. This is fine for backups, fileserving etc.

I suppose one could also move the mount point backwards to /ibays, or even use
multiple drives this way.

[Kenneth]

Hello Again,

I have discovered somthing cool, webmin ( http://www.webmin.com/webmin/ ) It alows to to acomplish many tasks using an easy to use web based interface.

For example, I installed a second hard drive by clicking on the tab "hardware" then selecting "partitions" and then selcting the correct drive (ide a/b/c) and formating it.

Then I used webmin to mount the new partition and it even setup FStab correctely!

Would anyone be interested if I wrote a tutorial on how to use a second hard disk with e-smith/webmin?

Kenneth

[Charlie Brady]

Kenneth wrote:

> I have discovered somthing cool, webmin (
> http://www.webmin.com/webmin/ ) It alows to to acomplish many
> tasks using an easy to use web based interface.

We strongly discourage the installation of webmin on the e-smith server and gateway.  The system configuration processes of the e-smith software and webmin are mutually incompatible - they interfere with each other. If you use webmin you might break  your server, or on the other hand, if you use webmin to make custom changes, you may find that the changes suddenly disappear when you use the e-smith manager.

Better advice is stick with the e-smith manager, and ask questions  here, and use the design documentation on www.e-smith.org to correctly modify the e-smith system.

Regards

Charlie

[Kenneth]

Oops,

I am very sorry to encourage the use of webmin on e-smith. I will unistall webmin asap. I hope I don't get banned from this board

Very Sorry,
Kenneth

[Charlie Brady]

Kenneth wrote:

> I am very sorry to encourage the use of webmin on e-smith. I
> will unistall webmin asap.

You're very welcome to use webmin on your own server!

> I hope I don't get banned from this board

Of course not. We welcome your ideas, we just don't promise to agree with them all.

Regards

Charlie

[Patrik]

Hi!
I´ve tried this one with mounting an extra harddisk as an iBay, but I can't get it to work properly. I have set the permissions to the ibay so everyone can read&write, but I still get access denied when I try to add something new to the ibay. I can see the ibay from my Windows box, and read files from it, but cannot add new files. I tried to check and alter the permissions on the e-smith server, but no success. I do a chmod so everyone has full access to the extra harddrive, and the ls -l command shows that everyone has full access. Then I mount the drive under files, and checks the permissions again. Then the E-smith has changed the permissions to read-only. This thing is very annoying, what's the use of a fileserver if you cant' add new files? Anyone has a clue what's wrong?