[Techtalk] booting a diskless client

[Maria McKinley]

Maria McKinley wrote:
> Hello there,
> 
> I am trying to boot a machine over the network, and it gets as far as 
> looking for /sbin/init, and then I get a kernel panic.
> 
> I know that it is mounting the root directory, because if I eliminate 
> the directory /sys, it complains that it cannot mount sys. I know that 
> the file init exists in the root directory, and works with the server.
> 
> nina:~# file /tftpboot/oscar/sbin/init
> /tftpboot/oscar/sbin/init: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 
> (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, stripped
> 
> nina:~# ls -lh /tftpboot/oscar/sbin/init
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 37K 2008-09-29 13:32 /tftpboot/oscar/sbin/init
> nina:~# ls -lh /sbin/init
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 37K 2008-08-12 07:20 /sbin/init
> nina:~#
> 
> I don't understand why it believes that /sbin/init isn't there!
> 
> Any advice would be awesome.
> 
> thanks,
> maria

Now I am really confused. I was curious, so tried truly making 
/sbin/init not be there, and now the machine appears to get stuck trying 
to mount root. The console is just full of trying to mount and server 
not responding messages. Bloody hell, that makes no sense.

But then the server logs say this:

Sep 29 13:36:57 nina mountd[2616]: authenticated mount request from 
10.208.108.28:842 for /tftpboot/oscar (/tftpboot)
Sep 29 13:36:58 nina mountd[2616]: authenticated mount request from 
10.208.108.28:849 for /tftpboot/oscar (/tftpboot)
Sep 29 13:36:58 nina mountd[2616]: refused unmount request from 
10.208.108.28 for /root (/): not exported

Which I think means that it is trying to unmount the root directory, but 
calling it the wrong name. Or something. But I have no idea why, and 
none of this makes a lick of sense to me. Blech.

thanks,
maria