A different cause for "Warning: unable to open an initial console"

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:48:29 +0300, toomas at xxxxx (Toomas Tamm) said:

  > Dear mr. Lange,
  > I today had an experinece with FAI which appears not to be documented
  > on the net. You may post my e-mail to the web if you wish, or forward
  > to a mailing list, but please remove my e-mail addresses to reduce
  > spam.

  > I was struggiling with "Warning: unable to open an initial console"
  > during boot. Exactly the same symptoms as in
  > http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-fai@rrz.uni-koeln.de/msg03419.html
  > Just a reboot soon after mounting nfsroot.

  > The reason was quite different, however:

  > I had included the "udev" package into NFSROOT_PACKAGES in
  > /etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf because I had been struggling with udev
  > at a point furhter down the installation sequence. This was a "just in
  > case" change and I had even forgotten to create a new nfsroot, so it
  > had been sitting there for a while. Today I generated a new nfsroot
  > for unrelated reasons and suddenly FAI stopped working with the
  > symptoms described above.

  > After a lot of trial and error and with the help of subversion (always
  > keep your fai configuration under revision control! :-) ) I traced it
  > back to the nearly-empty /dev subdirectory which waits for the devfs
  > to be mounted...

  > Probably a workaround would have been to populate the /dev with
  > required nodes. I tried adding /dev/console and /dev/tty[0-9] but that
  > was apparently not sufficient. At this point I removed the udev
  > package from NFSROOT_PACKAGES, re-made the nfsroot, and things went
  > back to normal.

  > I hope this report, if published, will save some trouble and
  > frustration for someone in the future.

  > PS I used Debian 'stable' (sarge) on i386 throughout.