Stateless Linux experience...
Mike Herrick
mherrick at corente.com
Mon Nov 15 18:13:29 UTC 2004
Thought I'd give this a try. Still in progress, but a couple of pointers to
pass on to anyone who wants to give it a go.
1) First, make sure you get the latest source from CVS. There are a couple
of bugs in parsing arguments that have been fixed (as noted in
https://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2004-November/msg00233
.html).
2) Even with the latest code, there is a typo on line 96 of
stateless-snapshooter.py ("--protosytem" should be "--protosystem").
3) I tried this on a machine that initially had 128MB of RAM. When I got to
the "stateless-snapshooter -n -p DemoSystem" step, I ran out of memory:
"device-mapper ioctl cmd 9 failed: Cannot allocate memory". I added 128MB
of RAM and still had the same problem, so I stopped some non-essential
services (httpd, sendmail, etc.). Then I was able to continue.
4) Because I needed to reboot to add RAM, all of the files that I had copied
from the 'test' system to /srv/stateless/protosystem/DemoSystem seemed to
have been lost. It wasn't until after I had re-copied them from the test
machine that I remembered the "mount /dev/mapper/VGStateless-DemoSystem
/srv/stateless/protosystems/DemoSystem" command in one of the previous
steps. Moral of the story: add it to the /etc/fstab so it'll be
automatically remounted on reboots.
5) In the /etc/dhcpd.conf file, it refers to "linux-install/pxelinux.0" as
the PXE bootable image, but when the PXE client connects this file is not
found. I copied /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 (from syslinux RPM) to
/tftpboot/linux-install.
6) Because of the RAM problem above, I'm not sure that subsequent
invocations of "stateless-snapshooter -n -p DemoSystem" actually worked as
designed. When I execute "stateless-snapshooter -l", I get:
Protosystems:
DemoSystem
But it doesn't say anything about snapshots. This makes me nervous. What
should the output look like?
7) When I run "python statelessGenPXEConfig.py" after adding the MAC
addresses, I get "Unable to get NFS location of DemoSystem snapshot
DemoSystem-1". I'm not exactly sure where it's supposed to have picked up
the NFS path definition from. It appears to me from browsing some of the
code that somewhere along the line I was supposed to have executed
"stateless-servers", but I didn't see anything about that in the
documentation.
Since the statelssGenPXEConfig.py script failed to generate any PXE
configuration, I generated my own by hand:
DEFAULT stateless/DemoSystem/DemoSystem-1/vmlinuz
initrd=stateless/DemoSystem/DemoSystem-1/initrd.img
NFSROOT=6.6.6.1:/srv/stateless/snapshots/DemoSystem/DemoSystem-1
I then added the following to /etc/exports:
/srv/stateless/snapshots/DemoSystem/DemoSystem-1 *(ro,async)
With these changes, I was able to get a machine to boot from the snapshot,
but there were many errors/warnings stemming from having a read-only root
(and /var) filesystem on a diskless client.
When I finally got the machine to boot, it wouldn't let me login! I suspect
some read-only root problem during the login process that prevented the
login process from completing.
Mike.
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