I am thinking about removing all but 8GB of the RAM (a single stick) from the mobo but its 4x 16-core Opterons over 4 nodes, and 2 of the nodes and their memory are hidden under the top board. It would seem like a good option to provide a way to adjust the size of the swap partition prior to the auto setup, but there's definitely a bug afoot in that Ubuntu, Debian, etc. installs grub without incident when i specify manual mode w/ encryption and not automatic yet Devuan does not.
I was hoping maybe there was an argument I could set to the install process in some way that would allow me to disable or adjust the swap sizing instead of defaulting to whatever the system RAM size is.
Thanks
D.S.
This setup allows the sys-admin to choose any boot configuration and still have the benefits of fast access from the NVMe disk.
HTH!
]]>If you're using gpt with legacy/bios boot, grub needs a special partition, at least 1MB size, unformatted and type ef02 in gdisk or bios_grub in gparted.
The OP has an NVMe drive which is almost certainly an advanced format (4k) type — such devices cannot be booted by GRUB in non-UEFI mode even if a BIOS boot partition is present.
]]>If you're using gpt with legacy/bios boot, grub needs a special partition, at least 1MB size, unformatted and type ef02 in gdisk or bios_grub in gparted.
]]>I was greeted with an error about not being able to use the guided install as the install disk isn't large enough - due to the system choosing the same size swap as amount of RAM in the server, naturally. And, naturally at least as far as I can tell, there is no way to change the size of that swap partition prior to the guided install attempt.
Preseeding the installer with the desired partition sizes might be an option: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Preseed
But I would just boot the installer with a mem=8g kernel command line parameter so that it only creates an 8GiB swap partition (mutatis mutandis).
]]>UPDATE:
Haven't gotten back to trying on D1 as I wanted to try it on Debian - I tried the exact same thing in Debian 10 and, besides grub giving me trouble for not having a valid filesystem and then having a GPT partition table instead of DOS (and failing / refusing for "safety checks" until I fixed that), it installed grub on my manually made encrypted partition scheme. I did the exact same sequence in Devuan but with the result being the failure.
Thanks
D.S.
]]>Now, I am still here in the datacenter trying to do a manual install, trying different things, as it's choking during grub installation.
After manually creating my partition which was confusing and not very intuitive - at least in the respect of setting up LVMs for the encrypted filesystem - I got the system to install. At grub installation it fails with a message in the log regarding (paraphrasing, as I've rebooted now and trying other things ) "installing for an encrypted system but blah blah.. make sure GRUB_ENABLE_CRYPTODISK=y is in the /etc/default/grub config". I tried putting that in /target/etc/default/grub to no avail. Also of note is that I cannot boot off of my PCI-e NVMes with this server and a BIOS upgrade - which also failed earlier leaving me to have to do a BIOS image recovery - did not give the option, so as a result I opt to install grub to a USB thumb drive. However, because of these grub errors, I cannot install the system.
Is the installer not creating the proper configuration for grub when using disk encryption because of something not done during setup? I am creating a physical /boot partition, the 'use for encrypted volume' option on a logical partition, then to Configure encrypted filesystems and create them, THEN to Create Logical Volumes and I create a volume group and a LVM with the 200GB partition in it, and then again in the partition manager assign that as ext4 mounted at '/' as the root. Again the system does install just fine to the disk its that grub for whatever reason is not aware and doesn't do whatever it needs to for the crypto setup?
.. so this is why I normally opt to have it done for me fully guided. So, is there any way to change the amount of swap space that is going to be created PRIOR to the partitioning, disable it, anything? Hard choking without enough disk space because the swap is so darn large is silly and should be put in the trash can along with other kludge like systemd. ;D
Thanks,
data
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