Making kickstart NOT touch external storage

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Author: Simper, Brian D
Date:  
To: plug-discuss
Subject: Making kickstart NOT touch external storage

Can kickstart in Red Hat be configured to partition one set of drives
for basic OS image, leaving another set of Linux partitions untouched?

Scenario:
- you have an external disk farm (say, 10TB)
- attached to disk farm is a server where internal disks contain just
the OS
- you need to rebuild the server -- only the OS image on the server, not
touching the external disk farm

Currently, we have a kickstart procedure which will lay down the file
system on everything -- internal OS drives, and external disk farm.
This is a "totally from scratch" rebuild procedure.

Now we want a kickstart procedure to rebuild just the server; could be
for any number of reasons: replacement w/ new server (following hw
failure, for hw upgrade), or restoring to a known good source following
an intrusion or corruption (restore onto same system).

But we cannot seem to limit the disk partitioning to just the internal
drives.
"clearpart --linux" touches the disk farm
"clearpart --none" would not cleanse what currently exists on the disk

We tried an option of the device ("clearpart --linux device") to no
avail -- it cleaned everything.

Is there some method with kickstart to limit to just the OS disks,
leaving the external disks untouched without having to uncable or power
off anything?
We do not want to have to power down the disk farm or disconnect it from
the server to do an OS rebuild -- this method seems much too prone to
error, too great a likelihood that an OS procedure with "clearpart
--linux" and manual instruction to disconnect before initiating
kickstart would result in a wiped clean disk farm (and days reading from
tape)

Thanks,

Brian
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