Propagator

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Revision as of 14:05, 3 April 2014 by MichaelShigorin (talk | contribs) (init off ru:Installer/common/propagator per Mike ZB's proposal)
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Intro

propagator is a small self-contained early userspace Linux program to find the next installer stage (install2), LiveCD (live) or Rescue (rescue) image. It is a fork of mdk-stage1 which has been forked from Red Hat Linux installer's first stage Back Then(TM).

It's mostly dealt with by release managers, then by sysadmins when deploying systems, and normal users shouldn't even have to notice it most of the time.

Configuration

Complex parameters are written in "param:value,param:value" format. The main one is method whose value is one of cdrom, disk, nfs, ftp, http; additional parameters will vary depending on this one.

cdrom

Needs no additional parameters.

disk

  • disk (name of the disk holding the image)
  • partition (partition)
  • directory (path to the distribution/image within a local or networked drive)
  • uuid or label (UUID or filesystem label)

nfs/ftp/http

  • network: static or dhcp
    • if static: ip, dns, gateway, netmask
    • these parameters can be specified manually if DNS works:
      • hostname, domain,
      • server (server name), directory (networked resource path)
    • for non-anonymous ftp: user (login), pass (password)
    • if more than one network interface available: interface (the needed one's name)

Memory saving mode

propagator will copy second-stage squashfs into a RAM disk and mount the temporary root filesystem from that copy (which is useful regarding performance and te ability to take the media away); if this behaviour is undesirable -- usually due to the lack of memory for both in-memory second stage and its operation -- one can pass lowmem option by hand or within distribution so that squashfs is mounted from media without copying it into RAM.

Examples

automatic=method:nfs,network:static,ip:192.168.1.24,server:192.168.1.7,directory:/Compact/
automatic=method:ftp,network:dhcp,server:ftp.altlinux.org,directory:/pub/distribution/ALTLinux/Sisyphus/[1]
automatic=method:ftp,network:dhcp,server:companyserver,directory:/altlinux,user:XXX,pass:XXX
automatic=method:ftp,interface:eth1,network:dhcp,...
automatic=method:cdrom lowmem
automatic=method:disk,disk:hdb,partition:hdb7,uuid:48B3-5935

References

  1. ↑ don't try installing Sisyphus that way, better see regular