Fedora diskless feature

[Paul Howarth]

NICOLAS GOBET wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have 8 Dell PowerEdge 1850 to install. It's a good occasion to try the
> diskless feature of redhat.
> I followed this documentation:
> http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/enterprise/RHEL-3-Manual/sysadmin-guide/ch-diskless.html
> But there is a problem:
> when the pxe client boots, it makes a kernel panic, because of no init
> found.
> The server is a Dell Poweredge with Red Hat ES 3 (192.168.0.20)(up to
> date) and the nodes will have a RedHat WS 3 distribution.
> 
> The setup of the first node works great and I make an image using:
> rsync -v -a -e ssh 192.168.0.198:/ /diskless/RHEL3-WS/root/
> --exclude="/proc/*" --exclude="/sys/*"
> 
> Then I have made the nfs exports:
> /diskless/RHEL3-WS/root/ *(ro,sync,no_root_squash)
> /diskless/RHEL3-WS/snapshot/ *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
> 
> I can acces these nfs shares with each computer on my lan.
> The the dhcpd sends what's needed, exactly as described in the doc.
> The PXE client boots, gets the pxelinux.0 (given by the setup of Red Hat)
> 
> Then it looks in /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg, trying to find a
> file with its MAC Address and finally loads the client file
> corresponding to it's ip:
> #beginning
> default rhel-3-ws
> 
> label rhel-3-ws
>     kernel rhel-3-ws/vmlinuz
>     append  initrd=rhel-3-ws/initrd.img root=/dev/ram0 init=disklessrc
> NFSROOT=192.168.0.20:/diskless/RHEL3-WS ramdisk_size=10000 ETHERNET=eth0
> SNAPSHOT=192.168.0.220 NFSROOT=192.168.0.20:/diskless/RHEL3-WS
> init=disklessrc root=/dev/ram0
> #end
> 
> As written in this file, the client looks in ...../rhel-3-ws and it
> loads the vmlinuz and the initrd.img generated by the Red hat tool.
> 
> This works correctly but right after the load of the nfs shares appears
> the kernel panic:
> here are the interesting lines:
> RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
> VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem) readonly.
> Freeing ununsed kernel memory: 224k freed
> Kernel panic: No init found. Try passing init= option to kernel.
> 
> It sounds like the nfs share is mounted, but the kernel doesn't see
> anything on the "partition".
> I was able to mount the nfs share with the cd installation.
> 
> Has somebody an opinion about this? Where did I make mistakes?

Are you trying to install Fedora (as per the message subject), or Red 
Hat Enterprise 3 WS (as per all the pathnames quoted above)?

Paul.