[jdoiel at engr.uark.edu: Re: FAI 2.4 upgrade problems]

Justin Doiel jdoiel at engr.uark.edu
Wed Feb 26 21:17:17 CET 2003


I hate forgetting to hit 'g' in mutt.

Justin Doiel <jdoiel at engr.uark.edu>


----- Forwarded message from Justin Doiel <jdoiel at engr.uark.edu> -----

Envelope-to: ytiddo at bell-3188-02.engr.uark.edu
To: Felix K?hling <fxkuehl at gmx.de>
Subject: Re: FAI 2.4 upgrade problems
From: Justin Doiel <jdoiel at engr.uark.edu>


Heya.

I'm presently going through the same pain, so heres my two cents. :)

On Wed, Feb 26, 2003 at 06:39:21PM +0100, Felix K?hling wrote:
> 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.

I didnt run into this one at all. my boot floppies work perfectly.

> 
> 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'm also having this problem, no matter what, it reboots.
I THINK it may have something to do with me removing tcsh from my setup, but am not sure.

> 
> 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.
> 

what method did you use? i used the SSH method, installed an SSH client on the root
filesystem, and had to manually copy in a /root/.ssh/known_hosts with my server in it.
i still get an error message, but it works.

<snip>
# extra packages which will be installed into nfsroot
# add lvm, raidtools2 only if needed
NFSROOT_PACKAGES="expect pump ssh"
</snip>

i ALSO had to read through the scripts before finding out there is a LOGSERVER
variable that needs to be set in fai.conf, EG:

<snip>
# /boot/fai;chmod g+w /boot/fai. If the variable is undefined, this
# feature is disabled
LOGUSER=faimaster
LOGSERVER=ageruka
# use ssh or rsh for copying log files to user fai and for changing
# tftp symbolic link
#FAI_REMOTESH=rsh
#FAI_REMOTECP=rcp
FAI_REMOTESH=ssh
FAI_REMOTECP=scp
</snip>

<NOTE>LOGUSER=faimaster is a local change, i dont like naming users after services.</NOTE>

> 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.
> 

dont have that problem here. :P

> 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! ;-)
> 

hmm. that one either.

> 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

Good luck, hope I helped instead of confusing.

Justin Doiel <jdoiel at engr.uark.edu>

----- End forwarded message -----



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