Re: Installation

[George myglc2 Clemmer <myglc2@gmail.com>]

On 01/17/2018 at 15:35 Ludovic Courtès writes:

> Hi Gábor,
>
> Gábor Boskovits <boskovits@gmail.com> skribis:
>
>> I believe, that we could make a powerful extension to guixsd if we could do
>> an installation from an installation description.
>>
>> I think this installation description should look like the operating-system description we
>> already have.
>
> In what way would it defer?  :-)
>
> ‘operating-system’ *is* an “installation description.”

War story, FWIW: In the past I have upgraded systems from Guix/Debian
and and from GuixSD to new system disks by simply doing 'guix system
init config.scm'. I found this a lot easier than using an install
disk. The only problem I hit was that removing the original system disk
caused the boot to hang but putting it back into the original slot and
pointing the the BIOS at the new disk booted just fine from the new
disk. The behavior I observed at the time is described in bug#23072:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-guix/2016-03/msg00182.html

IIRC the details are: when running on a system disk (say: /dev/sda) and
installing to new disk (say: /dev/sdb) you must set the bootloader
target to /dev/sdb so the boot loader will be copied to the new system
disk. But, at least on my servers, when I remove the original system
disk, the new disk system becomes /dev/sda, and the bootloader fails.

Presumably this happens when, at boot time, the previously specified
target no longer matches the current deviceID of the actual boot device.
I am actively interested in perfecting my understanging of this topic
because I am about to overhall my server configs, and plan to use the
approach again. So Ludo’, if you see faulty logic above I would love to
hear about it.

TIA - George