Date: Wed, 21 Jul 2004 17:58:39 +1000 From: "Liam Hudson" <Liam.Hudson@asic.gov.au> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: freebsd pxeboot problem Message-ID: <OF9A988A9E.62113E75-ONCA256ED8.002B775C@asic.gov.au>
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Hi all,
Am having trouble with pxeboot on freebsd 5.1. Am following procedure
at http://www.tnpi.biz/computing/freebsd/pxe-netboot.shtml (relevant bit
pasted at bottom). This procedure states to create an empty 25Mb file using
dd, make a fs out of it (disklabel/newfs/mdconfig), then rsync the contents
of mfsroot to this fs. This is then used as the rootfs on the pxeboot
client (set vfs.root.mountfrom=ufs:/dev/md0c). When I try this, the client
hangs forever on "boot" in loader.rc.
However, if I simply create a fs using mdconfig and use this on the client,
it boots to sysinstall ok (ie gunzip mfsroot.gz; mdconfig -a -t vnode -f
mfsroot -u0). I can even mount this fs before I pxeboot and put an
install.cfg file there. However, when the client reads it, it hangs when
trying to mount server:/usr/local/export/freebsd to install the
distribution ("Mounting x.x.x.x:/usr/local/export/freebsd over NFS on
/dist").
I tried exporting the /usr without -ro but no difference. Suspect there is
no room on the mfsroot fs more mounting nfs (since I haven't got a 25Mb
file). Has anybody set this up before. I have seen somebody else had this
problem on freebsd list, but no response.
Any help would be appreciated. (Do I summarise back to this list?). Thanks
===========================================================================
cd /usr/local/export/pxe
dd if=/dev/zero of=mfsroot bs=1k count=25000
mdconfig -a -t vnode -f mfsroot -u0
disklabel -r -w md0 auto
newfs /dev/md0c
mkdir -p /mnt/mfs
mount /dev/md0 /mnt/mfs
There, now we've got 25 megs of space mounted on /mnt to play with. The
basic rule of thumb here to keep in mind is that you are building a root
file system for FreeBSD. Everything the kernel, sysinstall, and your
install programs needs from the root file system is what you need to have
in your /mnt directory. To get started we'll copy the contents of the
distribution mfsroot.flp to our new mfsroot:
mkdir /mnt/floppy
mdconfig -a -t vnode -u 1 -f
/usr/local/export/freebsd5.1/floppies/mfsroot.flp
mount /dev/md1 /mnt/floppy
cp /mnt/floppy/mfsroot.gz /tmp
umount /mnt/floppy
mdconfig -d -u 1
gunzip /tmp/mfsroot.gz
mdconfig -a -t vnode -u 1 -f /tmp/mfsroot
mount /dev/md1 /mnt/floppy
rsync -avzH /mnt/floppy/ /mnt/mfs
umount /mnt/floppy
mdconfig -d -u 1
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