Need guidance on atypical but simple setup

[otheus]

Greetings, old-time Linux user here. (old, as in first kernel was 0.96 pl12). My meta-problem here is that there is so much information here, and all of it is at slight variance to what I actually need, and those slight variances seem to have a lot of impact. My first attempt at booting into TCL resulted in a blank, inactive screen followed by (eventually) a kernel panic. Now, here's what my requirements and constraints are:

• Boot within Grub 0.97 (ie, Grub "1")
• Boot within 64-bit vritualization framework (oVirt-branded RHEVM if you must know)
• Modify and manipulate up LVM volumes (pvcreate, vgcreate, lvcreate, possibly pvmove)
• Mount and create xfs filesystems
• No graphical user interface desired or needed
• no CD-ROM, no USB available

That last one is a bit of a kicker, ain't it? Now please don't tell me "with RHEV you can add CD-ROM..." blah blah. OK, I can't.  I could PXE boot too, but that opens up the same can of worms. (Why? Let's just say: over-compartmentalization in our organization.)  Also, upgrading Grub is not an option.

That leaves working with the vmzlinuz and initrd files directly, which I'm comfortable with. My only attempt, which included no boot "codes" (as you call them for some reason; I call them boot-loader options or kernel parameters), resulted in a blank screen followed eventually by a kernel panic. I used the "jessie" release of dCore. Why? Because I have no idea what I'm doing, there are too many options, and that seemed like what I wanted.

Much thanks for any clear help.

PS: this forum's anti-bot/spam filters are a little bit insane.I can't read any of the captchas, and really? validate for every post?

[gerald_clark]

If you are going to use dcore, it's not so simple.
Start by reading the cor concepts, installation, and book from the home page.

[curaga]

Please try the standard Core first. Download vmlinuz and core.gz from here, boot with your current method.
ftp://ftp.nluug.nl/pub/ibiblio/distributions/tinycorelinux/6.x/x86/release/distribution_files/

[otheus]

Start by reading the cor concepts, installation, and book from the home page.

At first I was like, "hunh"? Yeah, somehow the homepage never found its way into my google search results. I was looking at 15 different other "starter" pages, all geared towards USB/Windows setups. But indeed, http://tinycorelinux.net/ is exactly what I was hoping to find.

[otheus]

First, the book is very very good. Would everyone write document so cleanly, so clearly. Hell, I'd be much happier if 1/100th of popular open source projects had documentation that clean.  But... there are some glaring weaknesses. (I hope this feedback is not unwelcomed.) First, while much of the book deals with a new installation of TC but there's no mention of configuring networking. Maybe it assumes everyone just has DHCP these days, which I guess is pretty reasonable, but it doesn't address the proxy issue, and I don't see the DHCP assumption mentioned anywhere.

Second, I couldn't use the link to FTP for the reason that I can't get it to work through our proxy. I used http://www.tinycorelinux.net/6.x/x86_64/release/distribution_files/. Could it be that coreplus64 lacks the tools I need? (See below).

Third, coreplus64 booted well enough for me; however -- and I would appreciate help with some of these:

• Is there a tool or a set of configuration files I can statically configure networking?
• No LVM tools (lvscan) are present. I can't mount LV volumes without those. I see there's a lvm2.tcz. Should that be all I need?
• No XFS filesystem support nor tools. I don't see a tcz for this. Without this, definitely dead in the water.
• virtio-scsi support. Virtualized environment with fibrechannel disks. Is there a tcz for this?

[Juanito]

There's a gui applet to configure networking in the cpanel.

For the others, you'll need to build your own extensions (which would be gratefully received in the repo) or convince somebody to build them for you.

[otheus]

"There's a gui applet to configure networking in the cpanel."

I'm not working with a GUI.

So what's the "native" mechanism whereby networking is setup?

[otheus]

Refactoring my questions:

• How does tinycore internally set up networking? Leads to: what files can I set up in my own initramfs?
• No LVM tools (lvscan) are present. I can't mount LV volumes without those. I see there's a lvm2.tcz. Should that be all I need?
• LVM is somewhat working through the lvm2 extension and its dependency liblvm2, but I get "/dev/mapper/control: open failed".
• No XFS filesystem support nor tools. The filesystem support is with filesystems-3.XX-X-tinycore64. Partially dead in the water.[/s]
• virtio-scsi support. Virtualized environment with fibrechannel disks. Is there a tcz for this?SCSI support via scsi-3.XX.X-tinycore64 extension. I don't think it's using virtio-scsi, but that's not an issue for now.

so: (1) networking and (2) LVM (research in progress) and (3) xfs toolset. If gerald_clark is correct about xfs, and that's the only thing, I think I can proceed.

[Rich]

Hi otheus
Basically all the networking applet does is create a script in  /opt/, mine looks like this:

Code: [Select]

tc@box:~/guilib/grabber/grabber-1.1$ cat /opt/eth0.sh
#!/bin/sh
pkill udhcpc
ifconfig eth0 192.168.1.30 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255 up
route add default gw 192.168.1.1
echo nameserver 68.237.161.12 > /etc/resolv.conf
echo nameserver 71.243.0.12 >> /etc/resolv.conf
tc@box:~/guilib/grabber/grabber-1.1$That script is then called from  /opt/bootlocal.sh.

[curaga]

xfs-progs is available in the 32-bit repo, but it should be easy to build for 64-bit, install compiletc.tcz for the toolchain. The device-mapper modules are in the raid-dm-* extension.

[otheus]

Thanks Rich!So you modified /opt/bootlocal.sh which gets called on early during the boot process. And you've made your /opt persistent somehow, right? That's very useful.

Now currently I have a problem where persistence simply doesn't work. If I specify both opt= and tce= to the same device, the system never boots. Example: boot code is:

   opt=vdb1/opt

The http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:persistence_for_dummies doc says:
 

Another way of saving your stuff, is to tell tcl to use permanent directories for /opt and /home located on a storage medium. This is also done via boot codes, with ”opt=sda1” and ”home=sda1”. ... If they don't already exist in the specified locations, they will be freshly created there and populated with all the default files.

But that's not the case. Further, if I specify both "opt=..." and "tce=..." and they're the same drive, tcl refuses to boot. Have I found a bug or am I doing something wrong? EDIT: IN the x86 /32 bit release I can specify both with no ill effects, but /opt is not created. However the twist is: I can't download any extensions at all!

[otheus]

xfs-progs is available in the 32-bit repo, but it should be easy to build for 64-bit, install compiletc.tcz for the toolchain. The device-mapper modules are in the raid-dm-* extension.

Brilliant! I used the 32-bit version. I only needed the xfsprogs, filesystems, and lvm2 pacakges; the rest were taken care of by dependencies. The 32-bit repo also solved a number of other minor issues. In the short run, this is sufficient for my needs. Thanks.

Now if I can only get persistence to work.

[gerald_clark]

You cannot define alternate directories for opt and home, only the device.

opt=sda1

[otheus]

You cannot define alternate directories for opt and home, only the device.

opt=sda1

I also tried this, to no avail. Neither for opt nor tce.

I read something that for text/command-line boots, it won't backup automatically. Could that be what's going on here?

[gerald_clark]

You can use the backup command to backup before shutting down.
IF you are using the opt= and home= bootcodes, do NOT include them in /opt/.filetool.lst.

Show us the output of 'showbootcodes'.