Fwd: Installation problems with NFS mount on sun Fire X2100 with suspicious kernel behavior

[Lukáš Oliva]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lukáš Oliva <olivalukas at gmail.com>
Date: 2009/12/17
Subject: Re: Installation problems with NFS mount on sun Fire X2100
with suspicious kernel behavior
To: Michael Goetze <mgoetze at mgoetze.net>


 Hello,
I have finally found the problem and as it might be interesting or
useful also for others, I paste it here. The original problem was in
inability to boot Sun Fire V20z over NFS on Debian Lenny standard
kernel (2.6.26-2). It was okay to get to the part of IP-Config that
nevertheless hanged somehow - produced none messages showed no
advancement.
 The error was finally discovered as coincidence of several issues:

1) Some problem probably with network card driver - even after
resolving the bug, I was not able to boot over this card correctly
which might me caused by only three pieces of hardware (already used
with unsure history) I used.
2) Console variable (kernel kernel line) was not well set which lead
to stopping of messages after successful IP-config
3) Of the three machines I used, one has probably some bug that
prevents it from booting from some NICs. The others have large HDD
which made it approximately 15 mins for ext3 formatting.

In total: I was not successful on probably buggy machine, then I moved
to another which on other that tg3 interfaces (network interface card)
worked okay, BUT did not show any output from the FAI header not on
VGA or on Service Processor. It was only present on terminal output.

So after quite long time, the machines were successfuly installed.

 Best regards
 Lukas


2009/11/20 Michael Goetze <mgoetze at mgoetze.net>:
> Lukáš Oliva wrote:
>>   Hello Michael,
>> yes, you are right that IP address is not transferred from PXE boot to
>> kernel. Nevertheless I think that ip=dhcp should make the kernel to
>> try dhcp on all addresses, not only on eth0.
>
> This is not a function of the kernel, but rather of the initrd.
> Unfortunately the standard Lenny initrd only tries eth0.
>
> Regards,
> (the other) Michael
>
>