[Bug 181258] Re: problem about diskless booting

[Philip Muškovac]

I tried to apply the patch in lucid and it failed as the function was
changed since jaunty. While at it I checked what the upstream code for
this was and found that this seems to have been fixed in debian a while
ago. So it would be nice if someone could test the upstream code too and
see if it resolves the issue. I copied it to a pastebin:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/427631/

** Tags added: patch-needswork

-- 
problem about diskless booting
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/181258
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Status in “initramfs-tools” package in Ubuntu: Triaged

Bug description:
hi,
I am trying to install kubuntu 7.10 (not updated, just the distro as it comes from the installation cd) using Diskless booting from a remote system which stores the kernel and the filesystem that will be used on other clients. I followed this howto: 
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DisklessUbuntuHowto#head-320eeefb87afe42faa400af457bd455bec59d7ef
but when I tried to boot from the client, the process stopped due to some kernel panic issue

ipconfig: eth0: SIOCGIFINDEX: No such device
ipconfig: no devices to configure
/init: .: 1: Can't open /tmp/net-eth0.conf
[  25.445685] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Googling around I found similar problems from other *ubuntu users and it seemed to be a problem related to NetworkManager
I applied the workaround described in the link above




"
      Note: For Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) it seems the /etc/network/interfaces needs a little tweak, in order *not* to have the NetworkManager fiddle with the interface since it's already configured (see also bug #111227 : "NFS-root support indirectly broken in Feisty")

so, here's what your interfaces file should look like:

# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system
# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5).

# The loopback network interface
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

# The primary network interface, commented out for NFS root
#auto eth0
#iface eth0 inet dhcp
iface eth0 inet manual
"




but it did not work. than I tried another trick described in http://wiki.ubuntu.org.cn/UbuntuHelp:Installation/OnNFSDriveWithLocalBoot



"
There is currently a bug in NetworkManager that means even though the machine gets an IP just fine from the kernel booting the network IF goes down and up again. This is bad, we don't want the network to go down while trying to read files over the network! A quick hack is...

vim etc/network/interfaces
Comment out the lines for eth0 (Or whatever your ethernet card is called)

We also need to do this to stop NetworkManager messing with the network card. Bit of a hack...

vim etc/default/NetworkManager
vim etc/default/NetworkManagerDispatcher
Add a line with "exit" to both files

"



but nothing changed and I got again the same error. I even looked up at bug #111227 : "NFS-root support indirectly broken in Feisty" and Bug #92338 in network-manager (Ubuntu)
I am not an expert; I understood that the problem could be caused by avahi, DHCDBD, NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcherand daemons.
I didn't know how to make the clients not to start avahi and dhcdbd so I tried to disable them by disabling them an the server with sycvconfig and then copying everything on /nfsroot (where the distributed stuff lies); my hope was to copy the files overwritten with sysvconfig in the client configuration stuff.
Then i put an "exit" record in the (created new) files
/nfsroot/etc/default/NetworkManager
/nfsroot/etc/default/NetworkManagerDispatcher
and added an "exit 0" at the beginning of 
/nfsroot/etc/dbus-1/event.d/25NetworkManager
/nfsroot/etc/dbus-1/event.d/26NetworkManagerDispatcher

again nothing changed.

Could you please give me some help?
Thanks in advance

Giuseppe