Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 04:21:17 -0500 (EST) From: allan@stokes.ca To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: sysinstall flakey after PXE booting 5.3 / AMD64 Message-ID: <54331.142.179.103.195.1101460877.squirrel@142.179.103.195>
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Hello, This message is directed toward PXE masochists. I'm heading straight to the gory details. I loopback mounted 5.3-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso and copied the entire boot directory onto my OpenBSD DHCP server. I tweaked this by adding the directive boot_askname="" to loader.conf. Then I PXE booted by Tyan S2882 to that weird askname loader prompt where it asks for a boot device. I entered by hand ufs:/dev/md0 and bingo I had sysinstall running. Under sysinstall I was able to run fdisk and disklabel successfully, configure bge0 via DHCP, and select ftp4.freebsd.org as my FTP server. I watched network traffic on the OpenBSD firewall and I see my server exchanging TCP/IP packets with freebsd.isc.org (an alias for ftp4). Then sysinstall complains that it can't talk to my FTP server and returns me to the screen to select a new FTP server. I select any server and then it asks me if I want to skip network config. No matter which path I choose, on the second pass it gets even more sick than the first pass. I end up answering "no" to about 50 dialogs before it returns me to a sysinstall menu screen. On the DEBUG console I see evidence that bge0 was switched to "down" status when I started the second attempt to connect to an FTP server, despite skipping (or not skipping) "network reconfig". I wasn't able to discover much in the "holographic console". That console has rm but not ls. It has ifconfig but not netstat. I can cd into /stand but hardly any other directory listed in the PATH variable. Next time I'll try typing xyzzy to see if more commands materialize. What seems clear is that sysinstall starts sick and becomes sicker. I've repeated this drill several times with consistently depressing results. Where I'm at now is wondering if I should give up, dig the server out of the network closet, and hang a CDROM off the side (hangs head in shame). Is sysinstall not yet quite up to the job, or have I missed a few specs of magic pixie dust in my loader.conf configuration? Allan
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