Posts made by jmason

@Sebastian-Roth set it up as described and did a debug deploy. There was a new message I hadn’t seen before:

*Preparing Partition layout
cat: '/images/myImageName/*.size' : No such file or directory

Same message appears after the Attempting to deploy image notice box.

In the Partclone window, the File System partitions for my linux ~500GB drive showed:

/dev/nvme0n1p1 as raw (134.2 MB)
/dev/nvme0n1p2 as FAT16 (209.7 MB)
/dev/nvme0n1p3 as XFS (1.1GB)
/dev/nvme0n1p4 as raw (510.7 GB)

Just checking to see if this is running as expected…will post nvme1n1 partition info from this first run once the current one completes.

@Sebastian-Roth @Tom-Elliott One thing I realized today is that when the deploy fails it reboots and that gives the system a chance to initialize the way the master image expects.

Initially I assumed the key to this working for my setup was in making sure that the smaller drive was the first drive in the master image captured, so that it didn’t attempt to deploy the smaller image onto the larger drive and then fail when attempting to image the larger image onto the smaller drive. I’m not sure that is actually necessary.

So I hooked up 10 of my laptops to the switch today and deployed the group, about half failed the first startup, but on the next reboot all of them initialized the drives as the master image expected.

This might not work well for a system with more than 2 nvme drives being imaged, so I’ll still help test anything you guys come up with and need testing. But I’m fairly satisfied with even the failure and reboot and hoping it will init correctly on the next boot.

@Sebastian-Roth Well if you move forward with this just let me know when you want some testing.

@Sebastian-Roth said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

@jmason @Tom-Elliott
Adding a simple sector count check is not much of a thing to implement and it would work in most situations (at least those I can think of so far). Even if the two disks are same size it wouldn’t hurt because deploying to the “wrong” one is not a problem.

This would definitely be true for me if my systems had 2 identical size hard drives as we would be imaging them both. I wouldn’t really care which one it picked as long as both were available at boot.

Could you make the functionality optional via some kind of check mark if multi-disk non-resizeable is selected? Then it wouldn’t affect everyone using that selection unless they so chose to do so.

@Tom-Elliott @Sebastian-Roth
So this is mostly way over my head, but there is some brief mention of dealing with nvme on dell systems:

https://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/04/sln312382/nvme-on-rhel7?lang=en

About mid way down the page it talks about how to pull information on each device, which might be helpful.

After looking further this is working with the PCI ID or slot ID as they refer to it, so it seems odd if it is tied to a specific piece of hardware how could the size of it change on a given reboot, or does the system just get it completely mixed up. I guess it is only tied to the memory controller, the result of lspci -s SLOTID -v is the same except for the Memory at b5400000 for ID 02:00.0 and b5300000 for ID 03:00.0

And I’m way over my head so I think I’ll stick to only general things here on out lol.

From what I’m seeing on other forums regarding this issue most apparently are using some kind of method to deal with it as you and I arrived at earlier.

Looking at nvme commands in linux now…for fun I guess heh.

@Tom-Elliott Just reviewed, no the related sizes were not the same, it appears only the PCI ID it assigned to nvme0 and nvme1 were consistent.

@Tom-Elliott said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

@Sebastian-Roth @jmason

I wonder if by-path would be a better option?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/persistent_block_device_naming#by-id_and_by-path

As far as I can tell in the pictures, the by-path portion relies on the PCI ID.

In the pictures I see 0000:02:00.0 and 0000:03:00.0 consistent. Or is this where the problem is residing?

I suppose by-id could also work, though we’d need to see 2 - 3 machines and see how different the ID’s are between them.

the PCI IDs were consistent

@Tom-Elliott Yes I think so, but its the only thing I’ve been able to come up with. I’m sure all the other “imaging” devs are dealing with the same issue or soon will be. I’m thinking if the system had come with one nvme and one sata drive it probably wouldn’t have been an issue, but not sure. These just have 2 nvme drives and I guess that might become more prevalent as time progresses…
ah well… maybe you or @Sebastian-Roth will have a revelation of some kind. I haven’t thought of anything else here.

@Tom-Elliott said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

@jmason The problem isn’t finding the UUID, it’s that the UUID for the disk will be different for each disk.

What do I mean?

One 7730 with 2 NVME drives will have different UUID’s.

Another 7730 with 2 NVME drives (identically sized of course) will also have different UUID’s.

Does this make sense?

Yes it makes sense, but I failed in conveying my thought.

My thought was there might be some way when you do a full registration on each host machine to have an option (requiring user input) to designate each nvme drive and its UUID to a fog specific parameter/field ( disk0/sda disk1/sdb etc…) mapping stored in the database.

Then during deploy if the parameter(s) for the drives are present for the host machine, you would have info needed to match the images up based on the actual UUIDs and it wouldn’t matter what the init order of the nvme drives are.

It would require user input to perform the mapping and be optional, and only checked/used for multi-disk non-resizeable.

On registration, Do you wish to register you drives for use in multi-disk capture/deploy operations? Could maybe even have an option for the UUIDs to be entered manually from the web GUI, but it would be best to capture the UUIDs during the host registration.

So the needed info would not be saved with the image, but with the Host machine information in the database.

Not sure if that’s feasible, but just a thought.

@Tom-Elliott said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

@Sebastian-Roth everything I’ve found on this issue refers to using the disks uuid to identify which one to apply it to. That doesn’t help us much as every drive on a system would have its own uuid.

When registering a system Host into Fog, you’d have to store the UUIDs of the drives and then specify which one would be your disk0/sda and disk/sdb, etc etc, … thinking out loud is all.

Then on deploy if the UUID fields and their mappings are set you use that, otherwise operate as usual.

@Sebastian-Roth said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

What is your deadline to get those devices imaged?

I have until mid March before my first full implementation with these new training laptops. I can always image them individually via usb until a working solution is found (aka someone learns how to control the nvme and its feelings of revealing).

@Sebastian-Roth Is it feasible to have an option for multiple disk non-resizeable and some kind of checkbox/option to notify fog that the machines are identical drive wise/hardware wise and would it make a difference. It’s been a long time since I did any coding, and it wasn’t related to this at all, just throwing a thought out.

@george1421 said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

@jmason said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

There is a BIOS update with the following fixes, but don’t see anything related to our issue. I can go ahead and update the system with all the latest fixes available if requested.

I would do this no matter what even though the change log shows the fix primarily dealing with the usb-c dock.

I did load all available bios/firmware updates and retested the behavior and it is still the same.

@Sebastian-Roth said in Dell 7730 precision laptop deploy GPT error message:

SystemRescueCD

5 reboots, 1st 4 times different init, 5th same as 1st

@Sebastian-Roth

First 4 reboots in archlinux showed all different inits it appears.

reboot -5- was like -1-

@Tom-Elliott I specifically have set the mode to AHCI for these systems.

@Sebastian-Roth

I am unable to get Debian live to start up after the initial run without install menu.

Ubuntu showed the behavior on the 3rd with lsblk and 5th reboot with dmesg, while reboot 7 was different than all previous, I’ll move on to the other 2 ISOs next.

-1-

-2-

-3-

-4-

-5-

-6- was like -3-

-7-

@Sebastian-Roth Grabbing the ISOs now, debian and ubuntu just updated their release.

https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current-live/amd64/iso-hybrid/debian-live-9.8.0-amd64-xfce.iso
http://releases.ubuntu.com/18.04.2/ubuntu-18.04.2-desktop-amd64.iso

@george1421

Here are two images showing the correlation. I only had to attempt deploy twice this time to get the difference to appear.

well I just ran it a third time and got another difference, but it appears it might be just like the first image displayed with only the output in a different order.
.