Trouble with a Bladecenter

[Philipp Grau]

Hello,

this post is more a braindump to get my head clear than a real question, but
if you have any suggestions you are more than welcome.

Ok, this is the starting point: HP Bladecenter BL c-Class with BL460c G1
blades. So far so good. We have a new FAI setup with version 3.2.4. The FAI
server is a seperate maschine.

PXE booting work fine, but when the blade should mount the nfsroot it simply
hangs. I tried several stock Debian kernels. 

By hanging I mean the server says "Begin: Mounting root file system... ..."
then I get some USB messages, a last greet from the network card bnx2
stating that the link is up and the rest is silence¹) no timeout or what
ever.

The BL460c blades have two network interfaces, But even disabling one of
them int server's BIOS - so that there is only eth0 - doesn't change
anything. This is because the kernel detects the interfaces just the other
way around than the bios lists them.

Booting GRML or a netinst.iso and mounting the nfsroot works fine.
Installing some other maschine from the install server is fine.

So, I do not get the point what is wrong with our setup.

So here are some questions never the less:

- Is there a way to get more verbose output from the kernel what he is
  trying to mount?
  
- Are there other ways to debug the problem?

Kind regards,

Philipp


1) The kernel is still alice; when mount USB media/devices we see kernel
   messages on the console.