Kernel (2.4.X series) not doing the initial boot.

[Stephane Enten]

I've been reading everything I found on that but it seems
to be an unusual problem since nobody faced it.

We have a clean FAI installation, everything worked as
expected during the installation process and we ended
up with a custom boot floppy with a kernel of ours 
(DHCP, NFS and NFSROOT ready). 

However, when booting the client machine with this floppy,
"nothing happens", sniffing the network (with tcpdump
analyzing broadcasts and also packets from/to the MAC
address of the interface) showed that the kernel isn't
even doing the initial BOOTP/DHCP request.

So he ends complaining that NFS-Root can't find a valid
NFS server ...

I read the FAI and nfsroot.txt documentation but didn't find
anything obvious so we did test with different kernel and
different configurations (BOOTP, DHCP, both, simple kernel
on a floppy rdev'd with the correct major/minor required
by nfsroot, with a LILO config such as the FAI floppy and
FAI-supplied kernels).

Has anyone already encountered such behaviour ?

	Stephane