Introduction
I often find that my tastes for hard drive configurations on my
installed systems is a bit outside of the norm. I like playing with
thin LVs, BTRFS snapshots, or whatever new thing
there is around the corner. The Anaconda UI has been adding support for
these fringe cases but I still find it hard to get Anaconda to do what I
want in certain cases.
An example of this happened most recently when I went to reformat and
install Fedora 20 on my laptop. Ultimately what I wanted was encrypted
root and swap devices and btrfs filesystems on root and boot. One other
requirement was that I needed to leave sda4 (a Windows Partition)
completely intact. At the end the configuration should look something
like:
\
[root@lintop ~]# lsblk /dev/sda
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda 8:0 0 465.8G 0 disk
├─sda1 8:1 0 1G 0 part /boot
├─sda2 8:2 0 4G 0 part
│ └─cryptoswap 253:1 0 4G 0 crypt [SWAP]
├─sda3 8:3 0 299.2G 0 part
│ └─cryptoroot 253:0 0 299.2G 0 crypt /
└─sda4 8:4 0 161.6G 0 part
After a few failed attempts with Anaconda I decided to do a custom
install instead.
Custom Install
I used the Fedora 20 install DVD (and thus the Anaconda environment) to
do the install but I performed all the steps manually by switching to a
different terminal with a prompt. First off I used fdisk to format the
disk the way I wanted. The results looked like:
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sda
Disk /dev/sda: 465.8 GiB, 500107862016 bytes, 976773168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0xcfe1cf72
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 2048 2099199 1048576 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 2099200 10487807 4194304 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sda3 10487808 637945855 313729024 83 Linux
/dev/sda4 637945856 976773119 169413632 7 HPFS/NTFS/exFAT
Next I set up the encrypted root (/dev/sda3) device and created a
btrfs filesystems on both boot (/dev/sda2) and the encrypted root
device (/dev/mapper/cryptoroot):
\
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/sda3
...
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sda3 cryptoroot
Enter passphrase for /dev/sda3:
[anaconda root@localhost ~]#
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# mkfs.btrfs --force --label=root /dev/mapper/cryptoroot
...
fs created label root on /dev/mapper/cryptoroot
...
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# mkfs.btrfs --force --label=boot --mixed /dev/sda1
...
fs created label boot on /dev/sda1
...
Next, if you want to use the yum cli then you need to install it
because some of the files are left out of the environment by default. I
show the error you get below and then how to fix it:
\
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# yum list
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/bin/yum", line 28, in <module>
import yummain
ImportError: No module named yummain
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# rpm -ivh --nodeps /run/install/repo/Packages/y/yum-3.4.3-106.fc20.noarch.rpm
...
I needed to set up a repo that used the DVD as the source:
\
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# cat <<EOF > /etc/yum.repos.d/repo.repo
[dvd]
name=dvd
baseurl=file:///run/install/repo
enabled=1
gpgcheck=0
EOF
Now I could mount my root device on /mnt/sysimage and then lay down
the basic filesystem tree by installing the filesystem package into
it:
\
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/mapper/cryptoroot /mnt/sysimage/
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# yum install -y --installroot=/mnt/sysimage filesystem
...
Complete!
Now I can mount boot and other filesystems into the /mnt/sysimage
tree:
\
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/sysimage/boot/
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# mount -v -o bind /dev /mnt/sysimage/dev/
mount: /dev bound on /mnt/sysimage/dev.
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# mount -v -o bind /run /mnt/sysimage/run/
mount: /run bound on /mnt/sysimage/run.
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# mount -v -t proc proc /mnt/sysimage/proc/
mount: proc mounted on /mnt/sysimage/proc.
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# mount -v -t sysfs sys /mnt/sysimage/sys/
mount: sys mounted on /mnt/sysimage/sys.
Now ready for the actual install. For this install I just went with a
small set of packages (I’ll use yum once the system is up to add on what
I want later).
\
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# yum install -y --installroot=/mnt/sysimage \
@core @standard kernel grub2 grub2-tools btrfs-progs
...
Complete!
After the install there are a few housekeeping items to take care of. I
started with populating crypttab, populating fstab, changing the
root password, and touching /.autorelabel to trigger an selinux
relabel on first boot:
\
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# chroot /mnt/sysimage/
[anaconda root@localhost /]# cat <<EOF > /etc/crypttab
cryptoswap /dev/sda2 /dev/urandom swap
cryptoroot /dev/sda3 -
EOF
[anaconda root@localhost /]# cat <<EOF > /etc/fstab
LABEL=boot /boot btrfs defaults 1 2
/dev/mapper/cryptoswap swap swap defaults 0 0
/dev/mapper/cryptoroot / btrfs defaults 1 1
EOF
[anaconda root@localhost /]# passwd --stdin root <<< "password"
Changing password for user root.
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
[anaconda root@localhost /]# touch /.autorelabel
Next I needed to install grub and make a config file. I set the grub
kernel command line arguments and then generated a config. The config
needed some fixing up (I am not using EFI on my system, but
grub2-mkconfig thought I was because I had booted through EFI off of
the install CD).
\
[anaconda root@localhost /]# echo 'GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="ro root=/dev/mapper/cryptoroot"' > /etc/default/grub
[anaconda root@localhost /]# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.11.10-301.fc20.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.11.10-301.fc20.x86_64.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-81c04e9030594ef6a5265a95f58ccf98
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-81c04e9030594ef6a5265a95f58ccf98.img
done
[anaconda root@localhost /]# sed -i s/linuxefi/linux/ /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
[anaconda root@localhost /]# sed -i s/initrdefi/initrd/ /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
[anaconda root@localhost /]# grub2-install -d /usr/lib/grub/i386-pc/ /dev/sda
Installation finished. No error reported.
NOTE: grub2-mkconfig didn’t find my windows partition until I
rebooted into the system and ran it again.
Finally I re-executed dracut to pick up the crypttab, exited the
chroot, unmounted the filesystems, and rebooted into my new system:\
[anaconda root@localhost /]# dracut --kver 3.11.10-301.fc20.x86_64 --force
[anaconda root@localhost /]# exit
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# umount /mnt/sysimage/{boot,dev,run,sys,proc}
[anaconda root@localhost ~]# reboot
After booting into Fedora I was then able to run grub2-mkconfig again
and get it to recognize my (untouched) Windows partition:
\
[root@localhost /]# grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Generating grub.cfg ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-3.11.10-301.fc20.x86_64
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-3.11.10-301.fc20.x86_64.img
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-0-rescue-375c7019484a45838666c572d241249a
Found initrd image: /boot/initramfs-0-rescue-375c7019484a45838666c572d241249a.img
Found Windows 7 (loader) on /dev/sda4
done
And that’s pretty much it. Using this method you can have virtually any
hard drive setup that you desire. Hope someone else can find this
useful.
Dusty
P.S. You can start sshd in anaconda by running
systemctl start anaconda-sshd.service.