Network booting with PXE

[Nathan Kinkade]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2004 at 08:27:38PM +0200, User Mike wrote:
> I've succesfully put up 4 diskless machines to boot up 4.9-release thru
> PXE. They all work almost flawlessly. But when I connected an old 1GB hard
> drive into one of them for swap, as NFS swap is a bit slow, it hangs for
> some reason at trying to mount the hard drive as / at boot up.
> 
> Dmesg reports on all diskless machines:
> Adjusted interface xl0
> Shutdown interface faith0
> Mounting root from ufs:/dev/ad0s1a
> no such device 'ad'
> setrootbyname failed
> ffs_mountroot: can't find rootvp
> Root mount failed: 6
> Mounting root from nfs:
> NFS ROOT: 10.0.10.1:/var/diskless
> 
> But on the machine I added disk for swap it never gets past "no such
> device 'a0'" because it exists and calls reset of ata0 and something and
> hangs there until reset button is pressed.
> 
> I'd like to know if there is a way to not try to mount root on local disks
> and only NFS. Should this be done in kernel or loader ...? Since the
> machine simply sits there I'd appreciate any suggestions.

Did you recompile your kernel with options:

options     BOOTP          # Use BOOTP to obtain IP address/hostname
options     BOOTP_NFSROOT  # NFS mount root filesystem using BOOTP info
options     BOOTP_COMPAT   # Workaround for broken bootp daemons.

By the way, how much RAM do you have in those machines?  I have found
that I get by fine with no swap at all using as little as 32MB - though
I am using Linux diskless terminals, but this shouldn't matter.

Nathan
-- 
gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys D8527E49
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20040126/c28bae1f/attachment.bin