diskless fc6

[Chris Rouch]

On 1/30/07, Davide Rossetti <davide.rossetti at roma1.infn.it> wrote:
>
> On Thu, January 25, 2007 10:05 am, Chris Rouch wrote:
> > On 1/19/07, Chris Rouch <chris.rouch at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Does anyone have diskless booting working with fc6 and could tell me
> >> what they did to get it to work?
> >>
> >> I have a diskless via epia M10K box, booting an fc4 image. Yesterday I
> >> upgraded the server it boots from from fc4 to fc6, reran
> >> system-config-netboot and successfully got it to boot as it had
> >> before, i.e. an fc4 image loaded over nfs.
> >>
> >> I then tried to create an fc6 boot image. I installed fc6 on a third
> >> machine and copied the files as described in the howto (and the
> >> system-config-netboot dialog). I changed the properties of the
> >> diskless box to use the fc6 image. This begins to boot, but then gets
> >> a kernel panic. The messages I see are like this:
> >>
> >> Ramdisk: compressed image found at block 0
> >> time: acpi_pm clocksource has been installed
> >> EXT2-fs: blocksize too small for device
> >> grow-buffers: requested out-of-range block 10446744071562067960 for
> >> device ram0
> >> isofs_fill_super: bread failed, dev=ram0, iso_blknum=17 block=2147483618
> >> No filesystem could mount root, tried: ext2 iso9660
> >> Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable  to mount root fs on
> >> unknown-block(1,0)
> >>
> >> (the above was hand copied from a screenshot, so there may be typos)
> >>
> >
> > Adding "ramdisk_blocksize=1024" to the kernel command line gets me
> > past this speed bump, but then nfs fails to mount the image.
>
> I've got the same problem... how did you solve the nfs mount problem ??
> I suspect that the 'mount' binary in the initrd does not handle NFS
> mounting somehow.... where does 'mount' come from ? is it from busybox or
> from util-linux ?
> regards

I haven't solved it conclusively yet. I unpacked the initrd.img and
replaced mount with 'busybox mount' for the first nfs mount. This
works, and the system boots to a login prompt, but there were enough
other errors to make me think this wasn't a good solution.

I looked at the script which creates the initrd.img and it just does a
copy of /bin/mount.

My suspicion is that /bin/mount should be enough, but it needs
something else to make the nfs mount work correctly. I plan to try
again, but this time with a more or less full FC6 installation on my
diskless image rather than the minimal one I had before. I've also
thought of putting mount.nfs into the initrd.img and using that. Both
of these will have to wait until at least the weekend though.

Chris