Ward William E DLDN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> Doug, I've read these messages and I've come to a conclusion: You are
> one of those people who screws up, and then says "I'm the innocent
> victim!  It's somebody else's fault!"

I don't claim to be any sort of "innocent victim" -- I have merely
noticed the hard way a significant flaw in a piece of software and I
have reported the problem, in the hopes that the warning might help
others avoid the same snafu and in the hopes that the software will
eventually be fixed.  (I'm not the only person by the way, who has been
bit by this issue.  An Google search reveals quite a few others.)

That there are people who instead of saying, "Thank you for the heads
up", and who insist on defending incorrect behavior in important
software, and to those who are completely unhelpful and feel compelled
to do nothing more than publicly scold me about doing backups, hey, more
power to you.  You keep me entertained at the folly of ever assuming
that your fellow human being is likely to actually be any more
reasonable than buggy software.  Just remind me never to give you my
computer to install an OS on, since apparently you would think that it
is okay to wipe all my disks, even ones upon which the OS is not being
installed, and then blame it on me for not telling you not to do that.

> Flat out, you are WRONG with your constant ragging about how Kickstart
> is messed up; you didn't know what you were doing (because you thought
> you did, and didn't read the Man pages or the docs to confirm it
> worked the way you thought) and decided that since YOU wanted it to
> work in a certain way, it MUST work that way.

I never said how it MUST work.  I said how it SHOULD work.  Things often
don't work the way they should.  Caveat emptor.  Just because things
don't always work they should, doesn't mean that one shouldn't point out
when they don't.

> I'm about to be in the EXACT scenario you are mentioning, except for
> one thing: I need the drive to install the OS on to /dev/hdb, not
> /dev/hda.  I have machines that already have an OS installed, and on
> THOSE machines, Linux is a guest in a dual boot system.  By >YOUR<
> rational, if I try to tell kickstart to build these systems, it'll
> blitz /dev/hda and leave /dev/hdb alone.

I never said any such thing.

> Nope, not the right answer.  I want it to install to /dev/hdb, and not
> /dev/hda, so I need to tell it not to blitz the drives, and to install
> to /dev/hdb.

Right.  Kickstart has an option to tell it to preserve Windows
partitions, making what you want to do easy.  In that regard, Kickstart
did things right.  I commend the authors.

> By configuring it BEFORE I start, with knowledge of EXACTLY what I
> want it to do.  Kickstart is only as intelligent as the person who set
> up the kickstart file.

So, now you are saying I'm not intelligent?

> On the other hand, in a few months, I'm going to want it to blitz a
> different group of machines entirely; erase every drive, mount the
> root drive, and allow me to come back later and mount the newly
> slicked drives (variable to each machine, in that case) where I want
> them for data (using LVM, I'll probably make them one spanned disk).

And having it automatically "slick" all the drives in the computer is
really going to save you *any* significant amount of time, considering
that each such slicked drive is going to require manual configuration
later?

> Different criteria.  But >I< need to figure out exactly what I want
> with kickstart... it'll do it, but only if I tell it exactly how.  And
> who knows, I might be able to figure out a way to get LVM to create
> the spanned volume in kickstart without knowing a priori what drives
> and sizes are available... which means I wouldn't even need to do the
> LVM by hand.

Well, now *that* would be a valid reason to have Kickstart erase all
partitions on the computer.  Of course, I did not tell Kickstart to make
an LVM spanning all disk drives.  I told it quite specifically to only
make filesystems on hda.

> A tool is only as good as the person wielding it; in this case, you
> need to admit the truth and say "Mea Culpa".

I already said "mea culpa" to the department head and she said "mea
culpa" for not backing up her computer.  (Fortunately, there was nothing
particularly important on the computer.)  Now it's time for Red Hat to
say "mea culpa" about having a flaw in their software and to fix it, and
for you to say "mea culpa" for not listening to reason.

|>oug



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