nfsroot not mounted, DHCP problems when using dhcp relay or gateway

[Thomas Lange]

I just had the problem, that a machine did manage to mount the FAI
nfsroot. It properly boot with PXE from network card and get its
kernel and initramfs via TFTP. Then the kernel boot, the initrd start
but the IP-Config call hangs and gets no reply from the DHCP
server. This was caused by a broken ipconfig utility that only occurs
when you are using a DHCP relay/gateway between your machine and the
DHCP server.
ipconfig is a small tool included inside the initrd that is created
by mkinitramfs. More info about the bug can be found here:
  http://bugs.debian.org/432977

The fix was to add a new klibc-utils and libklibc package (>=1.5.9)
into the nfsroot and rebuild the initrd with

 dpkg-reconfigure linux-image.......

Use can use those packages also in an etch nfsroot. The machine had
two network cards, so in the beginning I thought it's the problem of
switching assignment of the two cards (eth0 <-> eth1), but that was
not the case.

-- 
regards Thomas