Solved / new Problem ;-) Was: Re: Sending DHCP requests .... timed out

[Ingo Wichmann]

Holger Levsen schrieb:

> On Sunday 03 December 2006 17:50, Thomas Lange wrote:
>> Are you using a Cisco switch? I had similar problems with Cisco
>> switches when not enabling the fastport feature (this disables
>> spanning tree).
> 
> But Ingo wrote, those cards work with the debian-installer (and others)... so 
> I don't think it's the switch.

I don't think also ...

> Ingo, do current debian-installer daily builds (which (should) use 2.6.18) 
> work as well? Debian-installer etch RC1 had 2.6.17, but the dailys should 
> have .18 by now...

I've tested it with kernel
2.6.17 from debian
2.6.17, 2.6.18 and 2.6.19 from kernel.org
and i still got this error.

But i think i found a solution: initrd

i've installed linux-image-2.6.17-2-486 and initramfs-tools from etch in
the nfsroot. I configured mkinitramfs to use nfs:

diff /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf*
18c18
< MODULES=netboot
---
> MODULES=most
39c39
< BOOT=nfs
---
> BOOT=local

And created a initrd suitable for nfs-boot:
mkinitramfs -o /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-2-486-nfs 2.6.17-2-486

The file /boot/initrd.img-2.6.17-2-486-nfs i've put into the tftpdir and
i configured pxelinux.cfg/default:
LABEL faisysinfo
  KERNEL fai/vmlinuz
  APPEND initrd=fai/initrd FAI_ACTION=sysinfo ip=dhcp SERVER=faiserver
devfs=nomount root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=/srv/fai/nfsroot
FAI_FLAGS=verbose,sshd,createvt,syslogd --


This seems to work, but there is still an annoying bug probably in
task_confdir:
fai prints:

  Kernel parameters: ( ... stuff deleted ... )
  Kernel parameter ip= does not contain network parameters.
  Reading /tmp/fai/boot.log

Here task_confdir waits for several minutes, and then continues ...
task_confdir waits in line:
  syslogd -m 0 -p /tmp/etc/syslogsocket


But: seems to be not too hard to get rid of fai-kernels this fai ;-)

Ingo