dracut "mount.nfs: Connection timed out"

[Toomas Tamm]

On Fri, 2013-06-07 at 02:33 -0700, Russ Allbery wrote:

> Oh!  I'll try that tomorrow.  But it's supposed to default to next-server
> from the DHCP reply; I assume that's no longer happening?

Well, I did not do any extensive debugging. I just wanted to get FAI to
boot. Thus when it refused to mount NFS root, I did some packet
sniffing, discovered it was trying to access the DHCP server for
nfsroot, wrote the correct IP address into TFTP config, and made a small
note into my diary. Things have worked since that time.

next-server does point at the FAI server, which is the same IP ddress as
the TFTP server, and the correct kernel does get loaded. However, the
kernel is loaded by the BIOS, while nfsroot is mounted by the kernel
after another DHCP request. It is entirely possible that the dracut init
scripts are buggy in this respect.

Thus I do not know exactly under which circumstances the situation
arises or how the default address for NFS root is actually determined.
All I can tell is that the host whose IP address it actually used is
running DHCP, LDAP and DNS servers in my setup, and nothing else. There
is a slight chance it goes for the DNS server, but it would make little
sense.

Toomas