Bug#377643: initramfs-tools: Should retry if nfsmount fails.

[Tim Phipps <tim@phipps-hutton.freeserve.co.uk>]

Package: initramfs-tools
Version: 0.67
Severity: important

For some reason my diskless system seems to fail to boot every other time.
I get time-out messages from nfsroot and then the /init script dumps me
into a debug shell when it can't find /root/sbin/init.

I don't know the cause of the mount failure (see bug 359926 which has the
same symptoms) but rebooting usually works.

I think putting the dhcp...mount part in a loop would be the right thing,
network services are unreliable so failure must be an option. I don't think
this should go in the /init script since a failure to boot from local disk
is probably not going to fix itself. It should go in /scripts/nfs and could
be something like:

while true
do
  ipconfig ${DEVICE}
  . /tmp/net-${DEVICE}.conf
  if [ "x${NFSROOT}" = "xauto" ]; then
    NFSROOT=${ROOTSERVER}:${ROOTPATH}
  fi
  ...
  nfsmount ${roflag} ${NFSOPTS} ${NFSROOT} ${rootmnt} && break
done

assuming that nfsmount has a useful return code.

Cheers,
Tim.

P.S. I'm using dchp3-server to provide DHCP information.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.17
Locale: LANG=en_GB.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages initramfs-tools depends on:
ii  busybox                       1:1.01-4   Tiny utilities for small and embed
ii  cpio                          2.6-15     GNU cpio -- a program to manage ar
ii  klibc-utils                   1.3.35-1   small statically-linked utilities 
ii  module-init-tools             3.2.2-3    tools for managing Linux kernel mo
ii  udev                          0.093-1    /dev/ and hotplug management daemo

initramfs-tools recommends no packages.

-- no debconf information