make-fai-nfsroot stops

[Jens Ruehmkorf]

Hi all, hi Christoph!

> I tried to create the nfsroot with debootstrap today. (i want to use
> woody) The problem is that it skips and finish uncompleted. no kernel
> is installed so I can´t start the clients for installation.

What do you mean by "no kernel" is installed? You use debootstrap for
building a nfsroot to boot from, I suppose. If you want to install modules
to have them available after booting you can do that by

# cd /tmp/chroot/
# mount -t proc proc proc/
# chroot . /bin/bash
$ do-whatever-you-need-to-install-your-kernel
$ <Ctrl-D>
# umount proc/

There are several things that don't work with debootstrap, but I have not
heard of any problems you report (and the debian-boot people do quite a
lot of testing).

Ethan Benson fixed some bugs this weekend, try debootstrap 0.1.15.5 from
http://people.debian.org/~aph/ as well.

> With verbose output the last I can see is:
>
> -
> Setting up console-tools (0.2.3-23.2) ...
> Looking for keymap to install:
> NONE
> -
> afterwards there come a lot of blank lines.

Do you have gcc installed on your box? debootstrap uses "dpkg
--print-architecture" which uses gcc.

Do you have a stable and well maintained debian-system on which you can
test debootstrap out? Since debootstrap is only made up of some shell-
scripts you can simply build it on your potato box with something like:

# echo deb-src http://people.debian.org/~aph/ ./ >> /etc/apt/sources.list
# apt-get update
# chroot 644 /var/state/apt/lists/*_Sources
# <Ctrl-D>
$ fakeroot apt-get -b source debootstrap
$ su root
# dpkg -i debootstrap_blah.deb

> also there are a lot of dependency problems (with libc6,...) but I
> don´t know if this is normal

That's normal. debootstrap works pretty simple: it's a shell-script that
unpacks a predefined list of packages (that used to make up the base.tgz).
dpkg --force is used several times to install all packages which still
leaves dpkg complaining about dependencies; it doesn't know that we are
going to install everything desired.

So what should you do?

1. Build/get the newest version of debootstrap
2. Test it out on various boxes; I assume the box you use is somewhat
   misconfigured (I tested two woody and potato boxes, it works fine).
3. Have a look at the scripts to understand what debootstrap did and tell
   in more detail how and where it failed.
4. Find out what was wrong and send an email to 115699 at bugs.debian.org
   suggesting what to do.

Kind regards,
Jens

--
ruehmkorf at informatik dot uni hyphen koeln dot de