Current status of multi-homes machines

[Carsten Aulbert]

Hi all

On Wednesday 01 December 2010 19:00:24 Carsten Aulbert wrote:

> > Use fai-chboot -P. The initrd code includes some code which evaluates
> > the BOOTIF kernel boot parameters. fai-chboot -P in cooperation with
> > pxelinux will set this variable.
> 
> This looks much more promising than Michael's proposal, especially if -
> over time - a large number of machine which were more or less homogeneous
> are becoming mire and more diverse.

* -P sets the correct variable - good
* box still stalls

after 1 hour in the (noise) cluster room, some findings:

o the BOOTIF environment variable is set
o setting 'ip' in the pxe config file does not seem to make any difference 
anymore (in lenny it did)
o weird part, after I changed the init script of the initrd in the NFSROOT to 
output debug info "set -x" and outputting the environment variables "env", 
update the existing initrd.img (still in NFSROOT) and copying it into the 
tftp/fai tree, I still don't see this output while PXE booting the node
o after entering the busybox after PXE boot, I do see my changes, I source the 
functions file from scripts/ and run configure_networking by hand (and with 
"set -x")
  o the first part after 'if [ -n "${BOOTIF}" ]; then' works as expected, from 
the BOOTIF variable the correct device is found
  o since it's unconfigured, there is no /tmp/net-"${DEVICE}", thus it enters 
the large foor loop ROUNDTTT
  o IP is set to 4 values (<client-ip>:<server-ip>:<gw-ip>:<netmask>, not the 
full 7 nor is is ip=dhcp regardless of what is in the config file on the tftp 
server), therefore it starts ipconfig with -d $IP and stops there with eth0 as 
there is no DHCP server
  o I'm not 100% sure why the time out does not occur here, as the sum of all 
these numbers is less than 300s. Thus after 1 hour I would expect anything to 
happen here.

Open questions:

o Why no timeout?
o Where is my output (console=tty0 is set)?

I'll try to cheat and just add my custom case here for now and see if that 
works.

Cheers

Carsten