On 03/04/2013 02:14 PM, Ken Teh wrote:
>
> I've seen the same behaviour with my LSI MegaRAIDs and I find it very
> disconcerting.

EL6 was supposed to not be as nondeterministic as it has ended up being 
(I know, horrible grammar, but gets the point across).  Later Fedoras 
are worse in this respect.

>
> I use kickstart to upgrade machines by doing a full install.  I 
> reserve the
> system disks so I can wipe them out and reinstall at will. Now that I 
> don't
> know which disk is which, kickstart becomes more cumbersome. Either I 
> have to
> record the UUIDs and embed them in the kickstart file or open the box and
> disconnect any non-system drive.
Back in the days of VMware ESX 3.x, the instructions from VMware 
specifically stated to not attach any SAN or external drives, and to 
only have the system drives active, during an install or update on a 
host.  The RHEL underlying ESX 3.x (NOT ESXi, a different beast) is a 
modified and licensed version 3.x, and it was much more deterministic 
about disks; but VMware still cautioned against having data disks attached.

I know it's a bother, but kickstarting to a machine with only the system 
drive(s) installed is the safest thing to do.  And using either mount by 
{LABEL|UUID} or LVM is the only way to reliably do things if you have 
multiple controllers these days.

I've decided to just not worry about the actual device name, and either 
use labels, LVM with unique volgroups and logical volumes, or UUID's.  I 
have more important things to worry about.

But I don't use kickstart, either.