NFS booting problem

[Joe_Wulf]

John,

Thank you for writing.

At this point NFS is all I know.  I have 'gotten' the concept of kickstarting
only recently, much less learned and applied it and gotten it to work.  A
friend/co-worker helped me to get the NFS working.  I've set it up, the same
way for two different locations.  One of the kickstart servers is FC5 the
other is Fedora 7.  I've pretty carefully checked my configuration stuff.
Made sure DHCP, pxeconfig, tftp and NFS were set up.  I've done matched up
comparisons between the config files for both locations.  At the FC5 site
I can fully build repeatedly the same end systems (RHEL AS4u5 32/64 bit)
and (RHEL5 32/64 bit) while only changing the nuts and bolts in the %post
sections.  I'm applying the same logic and applying the same kinds of
things at the Fedora 7 site (even with the same IP networks/address space)
and find that the at the Fedora 7 site, something is 'wrong'.  About 1
time in 25 (or more) the system will build without anything changing; the
rest of the time it is not NFS mounting for the KS.cfg parts.  So, its
failing at the same place.

On the VC3 screen there is syslog-like output, of the following (retyped):
20:08:21  INFO    : doing kickstart... setting it up
20:08:22  INFO    : DHCPv4 interface configuration succeeded.
20:08:23  WARNING : reverse name lookup failed
20:08:24  INFO    : url is 192.168.10.2:/ks/ks-f/RHEL5u0x32ks.cfg
20:08:25  INFO    : file location: nfs://192.168.10.2:/ks/ks-f/RHEL5u0x32ks.cfg
20:08:26  ERROR   : failed to mount nfs source

I've put the 'seconds' in increments to uniquely talk about each line, as
needed.  Before ":21" I'm frustrated with the IPv6 that it wastes time trying
to mount, but hopefully someone will give me a way to prevent that.

At ":23" I do not understand that reverse name lookup failure.  DNS has been
setup, established, configured and not changed.  For these boots, it seems
that the errors only occasionally go away without any change to DNS or a
restart of the named daemon.  And when I don't get this error, the systems
NFS mount and build fully.

At the Fedora 7 site, the Fedora 7 system is a Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM
726 GB of disk storage with a 100 bit ethernet card.  The network connections
are through a Linksys RT41-BU router.  The kickstart'ees are virtual machines
on a MAC Pro with dual quad-core CPUs, 4GB RAM and 520 GB of internal storage.
The MAC Pro has XP64bit installed and is current with all the Micro$loth
updates, no firewall, no anti-virus and no anti-spam enabled.  Manually built
systems of the above mentioned guests flawlessly install time after time, I
can get them repeatedly successfully mount filesystems via NFS (and
successfully export them too)

There is also a Dell XPS 1710 laptop within the same network, also every attempt
to build 32 bit systems succeed.  I even changed the 'mac' address of a problem
one not building to identify the one from the MAC Pro over to the Dell XPS, and
it built every time.

R,
-Joe Wulf, CISSP, USN(RET)
 Senior IA Engineer
 ProSync Technology Group, LLC
 www.prosync.com

-----Original Message-----
From: kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:kickstart-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of John Summerfield
Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2007 20:41
To: Discussion list about Kickstart
Subject: Re: NFS booting problem

Joe_Wulf wrote:
> I've got an on again, off again problem where I can initiate a 
> kickstart for
> RHEL5 (32 or 64 bit), as well as
> for RHEL AS4 (32 or 64 bit) and many times the NFS mount for the KS 
> config cannot be found.  Then, after numerous reboots to troubleshoot 
> the problem, poof, the NFS mount is found and some systems get built.  
> Nothing changed.  Even reboots of the kickstart server, the Linksys 
> router and the Mac Pro (with WinXP and VMware 6 installed) don't 
> change that many restarts have to happen before it will somehow, 
> magically start building.
>  
> A most confusing problem and one that I need insight, advice and 
> questions from you all on what to check so I can solve it.  All help 
> is appreciated!

It's some years since I did an NFS install. http, in my experience, works well.
Do you have some reason (other than setup) not to do it too?

-- 

Cheers
John

-- spambait
1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu  Z1aaaaaaa at coco.merseine.nu

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