Re: Booting Sun3/50 Diskless from Serving PC

David Johnson <[email protected]> Sun, 08 Mar 2009 19:12:35 -0500
Newsgroups gmane.os.netbsd.ports.sun3
Message-ID <[email protected]>
I'm not booting to multi-user mode but it's not quite time to ring the 
soup bell:

I get two warnings during boot to multi-user mode as follows:
Building databases:
KVM_mkdb: machdep.booted_kernel: the value is not available: no such 
file or dir

and the second more troublesome one:
mount_nfs: g21:/export/sun350/swap on /swap  not a directory
swapctl: g21:/export/sun350/swap mount failed

/export/sun350/root/etc/fstab has the following line in it for swap:
g21:/export/sun350/swap none swap sw,nfsmntpt=/swap
g21:/export/sun350/root  /       nfs    r,w

Yet, as recommended in the previous e-mail, the directory 
/export/sun350/root/swap  is really there as well as
/export/sun350/swap    this one is a file.  I enlarged it to 16 Mbytes

Sun350 appears to basically running though I'm not sure how it manages 
to get fully booted in mult-user mode without a swap file.  I only have 
4Mbytes of memory.

David Brownlee wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Mar 2009, David Johnson wrote:
>
>> I moved all of my various individual exports directories as they were 
>> shown in the NFS Diskless Boot Howto  to /export/root as you 
>> suggested in your email:
>>     *WAS                                                           IS*
>> /export/sun350/root                                     
>> /export/sun350/root
>> /export/sun350/swap  (is an 8Mbyte file)  -->  /export/sun350/root/swap
>> /export/sun350/usr /export/sun350/root/usr
>> /export/sun350/home /export/sun350/root/home
>>
>> My etc/exports now looks like this:
>> #/etc/export
>> /   -maproot:root:wheel -alldirs   sun350.grid.net         <---- this 
>> works without complaint from mountd
>
>     Now you have your exports like that you should also be able to
>     mount home and usr as separate filesystems if you want (though
>     personally I would leave them as they are)
>
>> I can boot diskless to single user mode but I'm still having trouble 
>> getting swap to work.  Your comment about /export being a separate 
>> file system on my server raises questions.  I simply did a mkdir 
>> /export to create this tree on my server.  But what I'm ending up 
>> with is completely different from what the NFS diskless Howto shows 
>> for setup.  I'm wondering what happened in my case and why am I 
>> ending up so different from the HOWTO description?
>
>     I suspect part of it could be related to additional checks
>     that NetBSD added a while back to prevent multiple NFS
>     exports of the same base filesystem, so /etc/exports configs
>     that used to work no longer do.
>
>     The diskless howto definitely needs some updating.
>
>     For the swap file can you try:
>     - move the swap file to /export/sun350/swap
>     - create a directory /export/sun350/root/swap
>     - Try the following in fstab on the client
>       server:/export/sun350/swap none swap sw,nfsmntpt=/swap
>
>     (According to the swapctl manpage that *should* work).
>
>
>
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