Dual NIC = hang

[Ryan Steele]

Robin Lee Powell wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 06, 2009 at 02:44:32PM -0800, kegstand wrote:
>   
>> On Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 2:28 PM, Robin Lee Powell <
>> rlpowell at digitalkingdom.org> wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> I'm trying to FAI a machine with two NICs, only one of which I'm
>>> using.  It netboots, but hangs at:
>>>
>>> IP-Config: eth0 hardware address 00:e0:81:45:ed:8a mtu 1500 DHCP
>>> RARP
>>>
>>> That's never going to answer, because that's not the NIC I'm
>>> using, but it never times out either.  How do I get things past
>>> this point?
>>>
>>>       
>> I have blown many hours on this.  You should try to disable one of
>> your NICs in the bios .
>>     
>
> Several hundred of our machines have two NICs we actually use both
> of, so no.
>
>   
>> I ended up making a fai config for
>>
>> machine-nic1
>>
>> and machine-nic2
>>
>> the machine would intiially netboot off of machine-nic1, then
>> further in the fai process it would dhcp off of machine-nic2
>>
>> after everything was done installing, I would delete all tftpd
>> pxelinux files except for "default"
>>     
>
> Ouch.
>
> Thanks.
>
> -Robin
>
>   
There have been quite a few threads on this, and it seems to be a common 
sticking point.  The workaround I used involved editing the initrd and 
editing some of the scripts and arguments to the embedded ipconfig 
binary which makes the request to the DHCP server.  The thread 
describing my fix starts here: 
http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-fai@uni-koeln.de/msg01553.html

We've been using this hack for awhile and have had no further problems 
with this particular issue.

HTH,
Ryan