That's a good one. I don't know of anything in the SCSI standard that might say whether a disk is internal or not. My only thought is use controller or enclosure-specific commands to determine if the port or backplane the disk is connected to is an external type. The caveats are that you need hardware-specific knowledge of what you might expect to find, and the utilities for that (e.g. hpacucli/megacli and sg_safte).

Hi,

When I install a system using Cobbler using kickstart/snippet, I want to only do the partitioning of

1.       Internal only disk

2.       Only one disk, if multiple exist

3.       Handle RAID/non-RAID scenarios

Is there a good/reliable way in Linux (RHEL and Fedora specifically) to determine #1? Since we are in the installation environment, some commands (like lsscsi) aren’t available. Here’s what I’m using in my snippet currently.

======== BEGIN SNIPPET ============

# Look for any 'scsi' or 'cciss' device; weed out output with partitions of those

# devices (part) and cd/dvd devices (sr); grab the first line of the remaining output.

# Assumption is first scsi device is "internal" disk. We want to partition only

# the first internal disk.

ls_output=\$(ls -l /dev/disk/by-path/pci* | grep -i -e scsi -e cciss | grep -v -i -e part -e sr | head -n 1)

# If we did not get any proper data for disk devices, just let anaconda do auto partitioning

# and use all/whatever disks anaconda finds, rather than throw an error.

if [[ -z "$ls_output" ]]

then

  ks_partition_cmd=""

else

  # NOTE: we are parsing a output that looks like this:

  #     lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 9 Jun 18 13:01 /dev/disk/by-path/pci-0000:0c:00.0-scsi-0:0:0:1 -> ../../sda

  device_symlink=\$(echo \$ls_output | awk '{print \$11}')

  if [[ ! -z \$(echo \$device_symlink | grep -i sd) ]]

  then

    # The first internal disk is a non-RAID disk.

    # Remove the "../../" prefix in "../../sda"

    first_internal_disk_name=\${device_symlink\#\#*/}

  else

    # The first internal disk is a RAID disk.

    # Remove the "../../" prefix in "../../cciss/c0d0"

    first_internal_disk_name=\$(echo \$device_symlink | awk -F'/' '{print \$(NF-1)"/"\$NF}')

 fi

  ks_partition_cmd="ignoredisk --only-use=\$first_internal_disk_name"

fi

# Allow anaconda to partition the system as needed

# using just the first disk

cat <<PART_EOF > /tmp/partition_info

autopart

$ks_partition_cmd

PART_EOF

======== END SNIPPET ============

Thanks

Balaji