> > As I posted prior to this question, I have problems in getting diskless > started with 5.0-Current as cvsupdated today. The problem is still the same > and after a night of hairloosing work I think I got closer to the problem. > > We use PXE as bootstrap environment, isc-dhcp and a read-only disk partition > /usr/diskless conatining for each architecture we boot diskless its appropriate > directory. The diskless kernels are compiled with individual 'ident Marker', > have options NFS_ROOT, MD_ROOT, UNIONFS, PSEUDOFS and device md. > The whole setup is as described in /etc/rc.d/initdiskless with special > /conf-dir entries and this scheme works perfect under FreeBSD 4.7.
I don't think you need MD_ROOT or UNIONFS. I also have BOOTP, BOOTP_NFSROOT and BOOTP_NFSV3. > FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT seems to have problems within its bootstrap process > to recognize that it is a diskless system. > > After the diskless station got its IP, loaded and booted the kernel I see this > on screen: > > Mounting root from nfs: > NF ROOT: MY.IP : /usr/diskless/xterm > Loading configuration files. > Starting file system checks: > mount: / : unknown special file or filesystem Do you have a mount point for / in fstab? I have something like this: my.nfs.ip.number:/export/current / nfs ro 0 0 > Mounting NFS file system:. > eval: /etc/rc.d/cleanvar: Permission denied. > . > . > . > After the last message a lot of deny error occur. > I modified all the diskless-scripts in rc.d with my own echo > commands to check which one gets involved, but none of them > get touched! The above process looks identical of what a > normal standalone machine does when booting. No wonder when > diskless does not work when the init process does not recognize > that it is booting diskless. The only mods that I made was to mount /var over NFS and not as a RAM disk. It would be nice if there was a knob to select that. :-) > > We do not use BOOTP and I do not know whether FBSD 5.X does only support this > scheme. We would like to stay with the NFS process. But I think technically > this can not be the problem, because after the station has already booted > the kernel it doesnt care what mechanism it booted from. NFS is the dominating > facility and I could see, the root partition got mounted as expected. Remember BOOTP is just a subset of DHCP. Actually the BOOTP in the kernel will first try dhcp requests before fallng back, IIRC. And it seems to need it in -current while it didn't when I last did a -stable diskless setup. > Can anyone help? Do I mark each kernel with 'ident DISKLESS' to give the init > process any idea what it should do? I use DLESS, so it shouldn't be necesary. :-) Well I learned a lot by watching tcpdump while it is all happening. :-) John -- John Hay -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] / [EMAIL PROTECTED] To Unsubscribe: send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
