pxeboot and nfsroot

Cornelius Koelbel cornelius.koelbel at gmx.de
Wed Nov 30 08:53:47 UTC 2005


Hello,
:) you are right. The machine has no disk. Depending of what you might
understand under a client (maybe a client program) it also has no client ;-)

I did not want to install. I already had a ready installation in a nfs
directory.
I also could mount this directory when booting the diskless client via
pxeboot and the kernel from the tftp server.

For some strange reason the switchroot did not work.
But yesterday i managed to boot it. So I guess I will figure out, where
the very little problem was a write my howto.

I did not want to use a program suite for this task, since I only have
_one_ client and I have everything I need installed (dhcp, tftp, nfs).
So why should I install an additional package, that - in fact - is not
needed.

But I will take a look at those you sent, maybe these are better or
smaller than the others.

Regards
Cornelius

John Summerfied wrote:
> Cornelius Koelbel wrote:
> 
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I am trying to setup up my clientless machine for two days.
> 
> A clientless machine?
> 
>>
>> THere is aboslutely no good howto for this.
>> I did it about two years ago, but now it is gone. (I missed to write a
>> howto ;-)
>>
>> I do not want to install using pxeboot, and I do not want to use this
>> stateless project. I don't habe an ldap server...
>>
>> I got everything set up:
>> - dhcpd
>> - tftp
>> - got my own kernel
>> - got my initrd
>>
>> THe machine having no disk is booting fine, loading the kernel from
>> tftp, and doing the init from the ram disk.
>>
>> But when it comes to switchroot or pivot_root i run into problems.
>> The initrd, as it comes with FC4 uses nash, where the mount command does
>> not support nfs.
>>
>> So I put several other things in my ramdisk.
>>
>> The problems I get are either
>> A) kernel panic
>> B) or a login prompt without the init from the nfsroot beeing
>> executed.     (Since the screen disappears immediatly I can not see,
>> if the
>> switchroot was done successfully...)
> 
> 
> Are you trying to install to NFS from a diskless client?
> 
> I don't think Anaconda supports that.
> 
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux has support for creating filesystems for
> diskless clients. If your budget doesn't run to an EL licence, then you
> could try one of the several clones which include
> Centos (commonly recommended)
> WBEL (what I use)
> Tao
> Google can find them for you.
> 
> 
> 
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