Problem with FAI on Lenny

[Ben Willcox]

Hello All,

I have been using FAI for several years, although only occasionally
during this time, so I often struggle to remember how to use it after a
long break.

Anyway, I have recently setup a new server dedicated to FAI, running
Debian Lenny. (My previous fai server was etch).

First of all, the documentation for PXE boot is confusing, as it states
to install the tftpd-hpa package which then installs the pxelinux.0 file
into /var/lib/tftpboot/, but then fai expects this file to be
in /srv/tftp/fai. Perhaps it should state that you need to copy the pxe
files from the default package location, and create a the new fai
location to copy it into?

But to my problem - I have followed the instructions, using my etch
config as a reminder, but booting my client shows that it has got the
DHCP info, it knows the bootserver and rootserver and has mounted the
nfsroot, but fails with:

Warning: unable to open an initial console.
Kernel panic - not syncing: No init found. Try passing init= option to
kernel.


After hunting around, I notice that this version of FAI has the nfs root
within a subdirectory of live/filesystem.dir for some reason. The
nfsroot within pxelinux.cfg/default does not refer to these
subdirectories, is this correct? If I manually alter this to have the
full path, the boot process gets further (i.e. the kernel loads) but
then I get a lot of errors about no such file or directory then it drops
to a bash shell. So, presumably some paths are now not correct.

Any ideas where I should go from here? I re-built my nfsroot using
fai-make-nfsroot, but the problem is the same. There is init
in /srv/fai/newnfsroot/live/filesystem.dir/sbin (yes my nfsroot is named
newnfsroot) so I don't know why it can't find it?

Thanks,
Ben