[K12OSN] Doing the Pivot Root - befuddling

["Terrell Prudé, Jr."]

Tom Ventresco wrote:

>Hold on folks :),
>Let's not start a holy war.  I am also using the amer.com SR24G2 switch and
>they work great.  BUT the amer.com SGR24 24port 10/100/1000 (48gig of
>backplane :) :)) does not work with amer.com's own c1110-32 gig NIC or the
>onboard Intel gig NIC on the IBMx206 (P4 3.2-hyper) with K12LTSP 4.4.  On
>a default install of k12LTSP 4.4 I get the root-pivot issue Scott is
>dealing with...My suggestion stands, get the amer.com SR24G2 it does work
>- - I have 80 thins on three servers using the SR24G2 and I think I can go
>about 10 more :)  ICEwm :) Sadly it does not have the baclplane of the
>SGR24...
>
>Get this, going from a k12LTSP server gig nic to the gig uplink on the
>SR24G2 them out of the other gig port on the same SR24G2 switch to any GIG
>port on the SGR24 - - works like a charm :)  Is that strange ?  Going
>straight into a  SGR24 fails ( pivot root NFS error ).  Very strange.  I
>thought amer.com was pro thins and linux ?  Their tech support has not
>helped.  Deer in the head lights.
>
>Hope everyone has a good start up,
>
>Tom Ventresco
>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>K12OSN mailing list
>K12OSN at redhat.com
>https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/k12osn
>For more info see <http://www.k12os.org>
>
>  
>

A good guy to call is Mark Wilhelm.  He might be able to assist you.

As it happens, I too have a SGR24, and I use the C1110 NIC (64-bit PCI 
version).  My other K12LTSP server (I've got two demo boxes that I use) 
uses the Broadcom built-in Gig-E port.  I haven't tried out the new 
K12LTSP 4.4, but I have tried out K12LTSP 4.2.1 on both of them, and it 
works just great.  Same with K12LTSP 3.1.2; it works fine with the 
SGR24.  Have you tried it out with any version previous to 4.4?

BTW, if you're looking at a switch to support lots of users, I have also 
used the SR48G2i with very good results.  It's essentially a Catalyst 
3548XL without Cisco's high price.  That's the switch I'm using to 
netboot my Sun Ultra 5's, and, as you might expect of any switch, it 
works very well w/ x86 and PMac clients as well.  Remember that your 
thin clients don't need, and in my observation will not use, any more 
than about 73Mb/sec, so you need enough backplane to support many 
100BaseTX connections and a few Gig-E ones.  You don't need the 
backplane of the SGR24 for only 24 ports of LTSP clients.  With any 
decent Gig-E switch, your server's NIC will become the bottleneck long 
before your switch backplane does.

The one problem with Amer.com switches, and why we don't use them at 
work, is that they don't support either GVRP or (Cisco-proprietary) VTP, 
which matters if you're dealing with larger, many-switch networks that 
use multiple VLANs like we do.  Our schools typically have 20-switch 
LANs and at least three VLANs per site.

--TP
_____________________
Do you GNU!? <http://www.gnu.org>
Be virus- and spam-free with Free/Open Source Software (FOSS). Check it 
out! <http://www.mozilla.org/thunderbird>