[K12OSN] problems during bootup

[Eric Harrison]

On Thu, 2004-07-22 at 11:01, Dale Harkness wrote:
> Hopefully someone out there can help me. 
> 
> We are running into an issue with client machines that have onboard NIC 
> cards.  the bios they have does not allow to disable the onboard NIC 
> card, so we simply unplug them.  we installed some Intel Pro 100 
> bootable network cards (PCI based) into the machines....they begin to 
> boot.....get to a point and error out saying that "no dhcpd-eth0.info 
> file" is available for the client.  all the machines are the same model 
> (Toshiba Equium 7100S) with the same PXE network card in them.  i know 
> it is not my LTSP server because we hooked a COmpaq Deskpro with the 
> same model NIC to it and it worked fine.  I have a feeling it is the 
> onboard NIC that is causing a problem, even though it is unplugged.  i 
> can also see during the startup that it is trying to install the wrong 
> NIC driver for the Intel, it is actually installing for the 3Com onboard 
> card (3c905 driver)  Help me if anyone can.....thanks in advance.
> 
> dale

Hmmm, this is an interesting one. Maybe Jim has dealt with this before.

What's going on is that the boot process has two stages: 1) bootp/pxe request
initialized the network and pulls down the boot image, 2) the boot image
executes which includes setting up the network from the kernel's perspective.

In your case, the Intel card is handling the PXE chores. Once the kernel is
loaded, however, the 3com card is detected and initialized before the Intel
card is detected. Thus the second stage of boot process tries to occur on
the network card that is not plugged in.

The detection of the network cards happens before the LTSP configuration file
is read (lts.conf), so any changes you make there won't help (i.e. you can't
get away with trying to force it to use the Intel card by adding something
like MODULE_O1 = eepro100.o). With ISA cards, you can add a couple of lines
to dhcpd.conf (see /etc/dhcpd.conf for examples) that tells the client which
driver to load, but unfortunately that does not appear to work with the PCI
network cards I just tested.

Just for kicks, have you tried plugging both the intel and 3com cards in at
the same time? In theory it should work ;-)

-Eric

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