Fedora diskless feature

NICOLAS GOBET nicolas.gobet at epfl.ch
Fri Mar 11 13:47:01 UTC 2005


Hello,

I have 8 Dell PowerEdge 1850 to install. It's a good occasion to try the
diskless feature of redhat.
I followed this documentation:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-3-Manual/sysadmin-guide/ch-diskless.html
But there is a problem:
when the pxe client boots, it makes a kernel panic, because of no init
found.
The server is a Dell Poweredge with Red Hat ES 3 (192.168.0.20)(up to
date) and the nodes will have a RedHat WS 3 distribution.

The setup of the first node works great and I make an image using:
rsync -v -a -e ssh 192.168.0.198:/ /diskless/RHEL3-WS/root/
--exclude="/proc/*" --exclude="/sys/*"

Then I have made the nfs exports:
/diskless/RHEL3-WS/root/ *(ro,sync,no_root_squash)
/diskless/RHEL3-WS/snapshot/ *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

I can acces these nfs shares with each computer on my lan.
The the dhcpd sends what's needed, exactly as described in the doc.
The PXE client boots, gets the pxelinux.0 (given by the setup of Red Hat)

Then it looks in /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg, trying to find a
file with its MAC Address and finally loads the client file
corresponding to it's ip:
#beginning
default rhel-3-ws

label rhel-3-ws
    kernel rhel-3-ws/vmlinuz
    append  initrd=rhel-3-ws/initrd.img root=/dev/ram0 init=disklessrc
NFSROOT=192.168.0.20:/diskless/RHEL3-WS ramdisk_size=10000 ETHERNET=eth0
SNAPSHOT=192.168.0.220 NFSROOT=192.168.0.20:/diskless/RHEL3-WS
init=disklessrc root=/dev/ram0
#end

As written in this file, the client looks in ...../rhel-3-ws and it
loads the vmlinuz and the initrd.img generated by the Red hat tool.

This works correctly but right after the load of the nfs shares appears
the kernel panic:
here are the interesting lines:
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
Freeing ununsed kernel memory: 224k freed
Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.

It sounds like the nfs share is mounted, but the kernel doesn't see
anything on the "partition".
I was able to mount the nfs share with the cd installation.

Has somebody an opinion about this? Where did I make mistakes?

Thanks

Nicolas






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