Re: diskless systems with RHEL 3 - boot hangs

On Tue, 30 Sep 2003, Daniel J Walsh wrote:

> That is strange, is there anything in the syslog?
> 
> If you set INITRD_DBG=1 on kernel line in the pxeboot file the script 
> will break on the client and start a shell.  The problem is that you 
> haven't gotten to the point of starting the diskless rc script.
> The first thing that script does is echo "running disklessrc"  which you 
> are not seeing.  What kind of machine are you using as a client.  Is it 
> very old.  Some older machines do not fully support pxe booting.
> 

Thanks for the tip.

The machine I used was a rather new Dell Optiplex.
I have switched to a different client box and have succeeded in diskless
booting on it. Now I am using a HP e-vectra (built in 2000), which has no
floppy drive. 

Problems encountered on the way were:
(Maybe you use the to improve documentation)

- I got an error 'reading beyond end of device'
  and could fix this by adding the parameter: ramdisk_size=16384 to
  pxeboot file

- the help file for redhat-config-netbbot say in section 2.5:
  add to /etc/exports
  /diskless/i386/RHEL3-AS/<snapshot-dir> *(ro,sync,no_root_squash)

  i.e. it says 'ro' for read-only, when in fact this must be 'rw', because
  otherwise the copying does not work.

- I found that I must also list in /etc/exports
  /diskless
  /diskless/root
  /diskless/snapshot  *(rw...)

  If I leave /diskless out, I got obscure problems.

At the moment I am fighting to get XF86Config right, because X startup
failed on the client, saying 'no screens', whatever that means.

For the final system I am planning (a diskless cluster of web servers) no
X will be needed, but on the test client I would have liked it.

I feel that my dhcpd.conf setup for the clients is not yet complete; it is
the first time I have setup a dhcp server, just for this diskless boot
business, and I am not familiar with it. An example dhcpd.conf would
be a good idea.


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