IBM HS20 Blade with RedHat FC4

I got this in my mailbox today, and had to post it. I left off the email address, to be polite to the person sending me the message:

> Hi Drew,
> My name is Christian and I'm having a similar problem that you have
> trying
> to install FC4 on a IBM SCSI Blade, the thing is that the
> installation went
> fine (with the acpi stuff) but now when it's booting throws another
> kernel
> panic, which is your experience with this?

Hello, Christian, I am happy to chat with you about this! =_)

We have a whole bunch of blade chassis, which we use for
development, testing, and other assorted things. We use Xen, which I
know little about, and FC4 seems like a good fit -- at least better
than the compiled-on-the-fly and filesystem-messy ways that we've been
doing it as of yet.

Cutting to the chase, I have found that if I do this:

acpi=off acpi=noirq noexec=off noapic

...and stick that in my kickstart scripts, grub.conf, and
anywhere else I can, then FC4 seems to boot and operate normally. I
have limited ability to figure out what these entries do because...

I absolutely HATE the management features in the blade chassis.
The KVM randomly won't work -- no keyboard access means the entire
blade is useless, and nonfunctional. I have been having two hells of a
time configuring my kickstart scripts. Sometimes I can't see what the
install is doing. Sometimes the keyboard won't register what I am
typing. When I do a kickstart, I cannot use the machine before or after
it fails, because I sometimes cannot see the screen, or the keyboard
won't let me type. Totally at random. I have even taken-out a hard
disk, and put it in a blade where the keyboard was working, and fired
that up -- only to have the keyboard input stop working. Sometimes
switching between blades helps, and sometimes it doesn't.

Sorry to bitch, but this is really the downfall of all of this
stuff: when you can't manage things with the built-in management, you
have an expensive warm brick.

xcat (http://xcat.org) is supposed to make managing these
things easier, which it does, but it adds as much annoyance as the
slick management features have, and now you have more obscure and
platform-specific commands and methodologies to learn, and then fix,
and then apply to your needs.

I am very glad to answer your questions, and hope the single
half-line above works for you, and makes-up for my subsequent
paragraphs of whining. =_)