On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 10:05:54PM -0500, dman wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 12, 2002 at 12:07:26AM +0200, Hans Ekbrand wrote:
> | On Thu, Apr 11, 2002 at 11:08:16AM -0300, Marcelo Leal wrote:
> | > i have one FreeBSD box running diskless fine.
> | > now, i wanna one linux box, and...
> | > the bootp, tftp and nfs servers are the same for FreeBSD and linux.
> | > the linux box get the kernel, but do not get the root filesystem.
> | > why???
>
> I'm having the same problem.
Do you have a setup that works with other clients? (ie. is NFS really
working for diskless clients?)
> In my case I see messages to the effect that the diskless machine
> couldn't find either the nfs or mountd RPC services and it will use
> the default locations. Then I get an error ("101") and it says it
> couldn't find the root partition.
I think that is a general error that might show up if the nic on the
client is not recognized by the kernel. I once had an old box that
etherboot could boot and get a kernel with, but Linux could
not find the nics (plain old 3com509b). The boot process ended in an
"VFS: cannot mount root fs ..."
What does the kernel think of its IP and hostname? Can you ping the
client from the server?
> | Has the kernel root-NFS compiled in (or do you use initrd)
>
> It has root-over-NFS and no modules whatsoever.
If you use etherboot to boot, you also have to compile in "IP: kernel
level autoconfiguration".
> | > i don't see neither the requests from inicialization messages of my
> | > linux box! only: VFS: cannot mount root fs... put floppy disk... bla bla
> | > bla...
> |
> | Any log messages from the NFSdaemon?
>
> None at all. The only logs on the server are successful entries from
> dhcpd and tftpd. This is what I can't figure out. I can mount the
> export from another system (that has a disk), but not from the
> diskless node.
>
> | www.ltsp.org is a great diskless linux project. Their documentation is
> | good.
>
> I'd rather do it myself. I've seen their binary packages and scripts
> that need to be run as root, and I'd rather be in control and
> understand what is going on.
You don't need to run those scripts, but LTSP can be of help anyway:
it comes with templates for various files in /etc that you can learn
from and manually insert parts from in your existing config files.
> I'm also so close to success that I know
> the problem must be something stupid I'm overlooking. I've just
> noticed the use of "rdev" in some root-over-nfs instructions, so I'll
> see if that makes any difference tomorrow. In the meantime, if you
> have any ideas or pointers as to what error code 101 means and how I
> can debug this, they are greatly appreciated!
rdev is not suitable for this task, according to is manpage. If you
don't use etherboot and dhcp + tftp, which IMHO is the easiest way,
you need to use LILO (or possibly some other bootloader). There is an
example in /usr/share/doc/lilo/Manual.txt.gz You are being less
diskless in that case, of course.
If you use etherboot you will need to tag the kernel with mknbi.
--
Note that I use Debian version 3.0
Linux emac140 2.4.17 #1 sön feb 10 20:21:22 CET 2002 i686 unknown
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