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We're right now in the process of deploying a set of fibre-channel connected hosts with multipathed root disks. The installation is automated through foreman, so we boot vie PXE and run anaconda with a kickstart file.

The default behaviour in anaconda is nowadays to use so-called user-friendly-names for multipath-devices (i.e. mpatha, mpathb, etc.). We would like to disable this behaviour so we have disks named by wwn.

As far as I understand the anaconda source-code there is a parameter/command called mpath_friendly_names, that can be used to enable friendly names (which is today's default). However, we want to disable friendly names and I cannot figure out what parameter/command in the kickstart will do that.

So how can I achieve this?

Andreas Rogge
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  • Is it necessary to avoid it during the kickstart process, or is it that you want to disable it for good *after* the installation? – Jenny D Jun 27 '17 at 16:32
  • We want to disable it during installation. As a fallback we already figured out we could disable it in a %post script. – Andreas Rogge Jun 27 '17 at 17:14

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try passing to the booting kernel (i.e. within the append line if you use pxelinux)

inst.mpathFriendlyNames=0

EDIT: this parameters is used when processing flags at /pyanaconda/flags.py

Initially processed flags can get their default value overwritten if the right variable is found when parsing the Kernel command line.

In this case it overwrites the default value self.mpathFriendlyNames = true

Pat
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  • I'd add an explanation on how this parameter behaves (and possibly if there's some limitations on when it's available). Just for completeness. :) – Esa Jokinen Jun 28 '17 at 10:01
  • We tested this and a few variants of this. Your suggestions leads to anaconda finding no disks at all. Everything else we tried just had zero effect. – Andreas Rogge Jul 11 '17 at 14:17
  • then you found a bug... try to see your Anaconda scripts. – Pat Jul 11 '17 at 17:02