From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Thu Apr 5 01:22:19 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 3E27A16A401 for ; Thu, 5 Apr 2007 01:22:19 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jclark@metricsystems.com) Received: from server300.snhdns.com (server300.snhdns.com [204.15.192.210]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 1802A13C4BC for ; Thu, 5 Apr 2007 01:22:19 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from jclark@metricsystems.com) Received: from ip67-89-211-170.z211-89-67.customer.algx.net ([67.89.211.170] helo=[192.168.0.94]) by server300.snhdns.com with esmtpa (Exim 4.63) (envelope-from ) id 1HZGfu-0005HD-79 for freebsd-current@freebsd.org; Wed, 04 Apr 2007 21:22:06 -0400 Message-ID: <46144FC6.3050801@metricsystems.com> Date: Wed, 04 Apr 2007 18:24:22 -0700 From: John Clark Organization: Metric Systems, Inc. User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de-AT; rv:1.8.1.2) Gecko/20070222 SeaMonkey/1.1.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-AntiAbuse: This header was added to track abuse, please include it with any abuse report X-AntiAbuse: Primary Hostname - server300.snhdns.com X-AntiAbuse: Original Domain - freebsd.org X-AntiAbuse: Originator/Caller UID/GID - [0 0] / [47 12] X-AntiAbuse: Sender Address Domain - metricsystems.com X-Source: X-Source-Args: X-Source-Dir: Subject: Strange NFS root booting behavior. X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Thu, 05 Apr 2007 01:22:19 -0000 I've set up a dhcp server to support two (or more) clients, which mount their root on an nfs shared volume. For one client, the booting process has one symptom: after the initial PXEBOOT and getting the parameters from the dhcp server, the boot process hangs at: pxe_boot: gateway ip: ... And after a few minutes eventuall loads the loader.conf and after a few more minutes, loads the kernel, which seems pretty speedy given the twirlers. On the other system, oddly, the boot process seems to whip through the above boot section with no hesitation. However, after the kernel is loaded, and the init starts up, with in a ver few initial commands there is a diagnostic to the effect: Starting file system checks: Then ... mount /: Bad file descriptor Mounting root filesystem rw failed, startup aborted. Since I'm booting off of the same hierarchy, I did create a ramdisk and initialized a file system to have '/var/run' created local to the client systems. Are there other things that need to be separated for each client? And would failing to do set these up, give the above behavior, in particular the failure to boot and run through the normal rc scripts. Thanks John Clark.