client install aborts

[Toomas Tamm]

On Mon, 2013-03-18 at 10:00 +0100, Thomas Neumann (FAI) wrote:
> On Monday 18 March 2013 03:18:53 George VerDuin wrote:
> > Truthfully -- I have modified a few things but I can not get back to
> > conditions where the black screen existed.  So I have no reproducible
> > problem and simple modification.
> 
> That's a bit unfortunate. Would have been nice to know what was causing it.

Just for the record: one thing that has been causing black screens for
me during FAI sysinfo/install/softupdate is probing for the (video)
hardware. Sysinfo is most aggressive in this regard, looking into all
sorts of obscure registers, but other modes of FAI may do this as well.
Thus I have added the following line in my /etc/discover-modprobe.conf,
both inside NFSROOT and some of the installed systems:

skip="radeonfb nvidiafb cirrusfb nouveau"

The problem mainly shows up on various server hardware. Desktop
computers seem to have more sane video cards. These particular drivers
cover the devices we have had problems with. Your device is not
necessarily listed. Notice that most of the drivers are called "*fb",
where "fb" stands for "framebuffer".

Regards,

Toomas