hostname resolving Re: FAI and partitions

[Patrick Dreker]

Hello...

Am Die, 2001-11-27 um 17.20 schrieb Antonio Beamud Montero:
> El mar, 27-11-2001 a las 14:34, Thomas Lange escribió:
> > >>>>> On Tue, 27 Nov 2001 13:57:49 +0100, Geert Stappers <Geert.Stappers at xs4all.nl> said:
> > 
> >     > Are sure the hostname is the problem?
> > 
> > I also think that the partition problem can't be an IP-address
> > problem. FAI creates some very usefull log files. Why not using them ?
> > I can not give any help without the log files. Please send the log
> > files to fai at informatik.uni-koeln.de, and I will look for the error. It
> > makes no sense to discuss an error without the log files !
> 
> The problem is de ip-address, without a doubt. If I define the class
> hostname like 192.168.0.87 the partition system works because fai
> recognizes the ip-address and declares all it contents like new classes
> i.e. 6GB and COPY. This way all works fine.
> If I declare felino, nothing works, because fai can't resolve the
> ip-address and can't get the hostname... (DNS works fine).

I just had ther exact same problem, and the cause was the following (fix
follows!):

I am booting a beowolf off the net using the on board PXE capable
Networkcards to do the setup in combination with DHCP (using ISC DHCP2).
The Kernel which is used to boot the nodes from the NFSroot has IP Level
Autoconfiguration enabled, and gets a commandline from PXElinux (a
syslinux derivative) which tells it all IP Parameters. These parameters
in turn are derived from the DHCP answer of the server, and as it turns
out, DHCP does NOT set the hostname on the client, and if the Kernel
finds no hostname it sets its hostname to the numeric IP Address it got
from DHCP, and this is why the FAI scripts fail in that situation.

I fixed this problem by adding
option host-name "gridXX"
to every host declaration in the DHCPd configuration file, so
effectively one entry for an FAI client in my DHCP config looks like
this:

host grid15 {
    option host-name "grid15";
    option option-171 "install";
    hardware ethernet 01:23:34:45:56:67;
    fixed-address grid15.my.domain.com;
}

Note that all hosts have a valid DNS entry, otherwise the last line
would need to be the numeric address, instead of the hostname.

> The log doesn't say me nothing... 
> Continue playing... :-)
Maybe your setup is not the same, but then again maybe it's a related or
similar problem...