Problems with nfs mounts.

[Henning Sprang]

Hi Kai,
First of all, please add a subject line to your mails in the future. It
helps retrieving and identifying them without looking into them.

On Tue, 2005-10-04 at 02:15 +0200, Kai-Felix Braun wrote:
> Hi,
> I am trying to connect four pc with fai. These are 2 a7v8x-mx se and
> 2 ct-7 nil 1  boards. So far I have installed a stable debian release and
> fai. Upon booting with pxe/dhcp I get the error messages :

What do you mean by "connect"? FAI is an installer, it's not a software
for connecting computers, apart from that they need to be connected in a
network and with some network services if you want to do a network
install.

> 
> Root nfs : Unable to get nfsd port number from server, using default
> Looking up port of RPC 100003/2 on 192.168.42.250 ...
> unable to mount root fs ...kernel panic ...
>
> It is mentioned in the guide to use showmount to see the exported
> directories in such a case. Using showmount I get : mount clntudp_create:
> RPC: Program not registered 

You sould check if the portmapper and nfs kernel server are running, and
your entries in /etc/exports are correct.

Do you have installed all recommended packages for FAI?
For a full network installation you need most/all of them, they have
been removed from the dependencies when fai softupdate was introdeuced,
which was a bit of an unlucky decision - fai should have been separated
into multiple packages with better dependencies instead. I am sorry
about that, it is confusing users, and me sometimes, too, and it's
probably not documented anywhere that you need to install the additional
packages for a network install.

If this is the first time you set up an nfs service at all, it would be
a very good idea to read the nfs howto at
http://nfs.sourceforge.net/nfs-howto/ as an introduction.

If you are generally not very experienced with unix network services and
such stuff, expect a high learning curve - it can probably take you a
week or a bit more until your first machine is nicely installed with FAI
(at least for me it was like that). You'll have to read the full FAI
documentation, and howto's to the services involved (NFS, DHCP, DNS,
SSH/RSH), really! But it's really worth it, because  starting with that,
you will never need to do such boring manual installations anymore.

> What to do ? Help is needed !
>
> Another problem is that the chaintech motherboards have the same mac adress
> i.e. 00:00:00:00:00:10. How can I install in such a case ?

This sound very strange to me, also that number looks very odd.
how do you come to the conclusion that it has such a strange MAC
address, how did you find this number?
Then, it's not your Motherboard's MAC address, but the integrated
Network adapter - sorry for being a bit picky, but communication is a
lot easier if we use standart terminology.

Henning