HP BL460c G6 - Any one got this working??

[Tim Cutts]

On 4 Oct 2010, at 4:04 pm, Leen Smit wrote:

> Hello All,
> 
> We just got a bunch of new blades in. Lucky for me they are a new generation: G6.
> I'm struggling to get these things installed, so I'm hoping some one here has experience with these.
> 
> The problem lies with the bnx2x network cards, which is not in my current FAI config.
> I have tried lots of different options, and I keep running into a wall.
> 
> The default 2.6.28 kernel panics on the network card.
> Back-ported version of that panics..
> 2.6.35 boots OK, but can't find the config space.
> I tried using the grml option, but I can't even manage to get it to create the nfsroot properly..
> Tried installing debian manually in the idle hope I could create a kernel from one node, that resulted in a not booting blade ("illegal opcode" at boot)
> The only thing I could install on these blades so far is Ubuntu Server. Tried to install fai on it to use as a base. When booting through fai with that kernel the boot just hangs (after USB devices).
> 
> Now these blades are not that new, so I'm guessing this must have done before, right? Its just debian after all...
> 
> So if any one reading this has a BL460c and installed it with fai, can you please reply and tell me how you did it with out sacrificing your soul to some dark deity?? Please?

Yes, we've done it.  You get the same problem with other recent ProLiants - this is by no means limited to recent BL series machines.  You need to install the bnx2x driver and firmware in the initrd that you PXE boot.  You also need to install the same modules and firmware in the NFS chroot.  Nothing else was required.  My procedure for such things is generally:

1)  On another machine (preferably one with the same hardware, so you can test it) install a kernel and the modules that you need.  I seem to remember that the standard lenny kernel works fine, as long as you have the up-to-date bnx2x driver as well, which you may need to build a package for with module-assistant.

2)  Copy the .debs for the kernel, bnx2x and firmare to your FAI nfs root server, and install them inside the NFS root, by using dpkg's --root option.

3)  Copy the kernel and initrd files to the appropriate tftp directory, and update configs there appropriately.

You'll notice that a lot of this stuff is the sort of thing fai-chboot does - we don't run fai-chboot here, because we don't want it messing with our PXE configurations, which are much more widely used than just for FAI, and our PXE/TFTP server is not on the same machine as the FAI config space and NFS roots anyway.  In fact, our DHCP servers, TFTP server and FAI server are all separate machines.

Have faith, you can make this work!

Regards,

Tim

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