Problem booting from PXE/kickstart on FC7

[Mike Wright]

Gary Schlachter wrote:
> 
> Mike Wright wrote:
> 
>> Gary Schlachter wrote:
>>
>>>    I am trying to use PXE/kickstart to load FC7 on an appliance.  My 
>>> initrd.img and vmlinuz are from FC7 and are loading but my console 
>>> output looks like the following:
>>
>>
>> <big snip />
>>
>>> Switching to new root and running init.
>>> umounting old /dev
>>> umounting old /proc
>>> umounting old /sys
>>> switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
>>> Booting has failed.
>>> Kernel panic - not syncing:  Attempted to kill init!
>>>
>>> Any and all thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
>>
>>
>> Hi Gary,
>>
>> I'll take a stab at it.
>>
>> I nfs install f7 using pxeboot and kickstart.  I seem to remember 
>> struggling with something similar.  It turned out that in the pxeboot 
>> stanza I had broken the APPEND line using "\".  Big no-no.  The "\" is 
>> for readability.  The APPEND line and all its options must be on a 
>> single line.  Once I'd done that it worked correctly.
>>
>> If that doesn't solve the problem would you post your pxeboot stanza? 
>> Might be a clue there.
>>
>> hth,
>> Mike Wright :m)
>>
> I finally got my initrd.img to load.  I found a post about changing the 
> init script in the initrd.img from
> 
>    mount /sysroot
> 
>       to
> 
>    mount -o defaults --ro -t ext3 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 /sysroot
> 
> and that did the trick.  However now my kickstart file is not being 
> used.  My pxelinux.xfg/default looks like
> 
>       label linux
>       kernel vmlinuz
>       append initrd=initrd.fc7.img 
> ks=nfs:10.254.13.1:/home/tftpboot/kickstart/10.254.13.112-kickstart 
> ramdisk_size=9216
> 
> I have tried with and without the ksdevice=eth0 on the "append" line as 
> well.  It is like the "ks=" is being ignored by the kernel alotugh I can 
> see it as a kernel option on the console.

Hmmm, couple possibilities:

Is the nfs server running and has the kickstart file been exported?  Is 
that machine running iptables and are the required nfs ports open?

When I was trying to debug my setup tcpdump was definitely my best friend.