Diskless Boot Problem

Erik Norgaard norgaard at locolomo.org
Wed Sep 21 00:11:01 PDT 2005


kevin stovall wrote:

> Thanks for responding and sorry it took me so long to respond. I am 
> still having the same problem that I was. / is mounted through nfs. Do 
> you know if the dhclient does the same as you described  in 6? Also, I 
> think that they did away with mfs in version 6.

you should (and have?) mount / read-only, then mount /var either as a 
mfs or nfs mounted read-write. If there is no writable /var, dhclient 
cannot store the lease - this is true both in 5.x and 6.x.

If you look through /etc/rc.d/var (there is an equivalent one for tmp) 
you will see it has three modes: yes, no and auto. If set to yes, a mfs 
/var partition is created, if auto, the startup scripts will check if 
there is a writable /var, if not, then an mfs /var is created - this is 
default.

There are good reasons for using mfs for /tmp and /var, as well as for 
not: by using mfs you have no cleanup, and no personal data is disclosed 
if logout causes a reboot every time. However, in particular for /var 
there are data that is usefull to keep: IIRC latex stores generated 
fonts there.

If you have an mfs /var then the problem mentioned should not cause 
nfs-mounts to be lost because the lease is stored in the mfs. But if 
/var is an nfs mount then you may have a problem.

I sent a problem report on this, it was closed because I didn't get back 
on it. Reason is that I haven't had time to set up diskless FBSD6 
environment. So, I'm not sure, however, if you include output from the 
terminal (yes I know it's tideus to copy), I can see if I can interpret it.

Cheers, Erik

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