FAI 2.4 upgrade problems

[Felix Kühling]

Hi,

I used FAI 2.3.4 with Woody and DHCP. On the upgrade to 2.4 I'm
experiencing 4 serious problems that prevent me from completing an
installation successfully.

1. I had trouble making a boot floppy. The newly ext2-formatted floppy
was automagically mounted as vfat and when trying to rmdir lost+found
make-fai-bootfloppy aborted. I fixed it by adding "-t ext2" to the mount
command line.

2. I can't get a shell after install or sysinfo (didn't try other
actions). No matter what I do (pressing <RETURN> or ctrl-c) it always
reboots. Somehow I managed to get a shell after messing around a bit in
fai_end, but I didn't really understand how.

I added a line "/sbin/sulogin" in fai_end. But the shell behaved quite
strangely. There was no prompt and backspace repeated deleted characters
on the terminal. After I made some mistake that killed the shell init
entered runlevel 2 and I got a usable shell.

3. The logfiles cannot be saved on the install server. I get two error
messages about rcmd problems. Sorry, I forgot the exact words. Maybe
this is related to the next one.

4. The DHCP information doesn't make it into environment variables. I
tried the dhclient -lf /dev/null command line as in get-boot-info
manually in the shell, but it didn't output anything to stdout. If I
understand get-boot-info correctly dhclient is *supposed* to output
variable definitions for all DHCP parameters. They are redirected to
/tmp/fai/bootlog and sourced later by task_confdir.

Thus IPADDR ends up undefined and as a result my 01alias doesn't add
most of the classes (NETWORK, LILO, BOOT, ...). Eventually I get an
unbootable system without a (simple) way to get a shell after the
installation and no logfiles on the install server. That makes debugging
real fun! ;-)

If you need any more details or have patches for me to test, just let me
know. The most important first step is probably to get the shell working
after the installation.

Regards,
   Felix

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