I have been trying to set up diskless booting but had some problems. To simplify everything, a copy of FreebSD on an old HDD formatted as ufs. No problems so far and
I boot the diskless client and everything seems to go fine until just before the mountroot operation diskless client shows:
For some reason the boot process shuts down the NIC and of course, nfs cannot be mounted as root. The loader.conf for diskless client is:
Host error message shows:
My questions about this:
1. I have a trimmed-down kernel so the most logical thing I have come up with is that I have not loaded a module that is needed by tftpd/nfsd?
2. How can you customise loader.conf for each diskless client? Surrently as I have only one cleint, I manually re-name the conf I want booted as loader.conf!
Progress on Q1: I copied a generic kernel from CD to the HDD and made the diskless client boot the generic kernel. It had some minor problems but it was able to mount root from nfs (drops to single user but df shows mounted)
Code:
# showmount -e
/ 192.168.2.0
Code:
fxp0: link state changed to DOWN
Code:
nfscl_load=yes
vfs.root.mountfrom="nfs:192.168.2.1:/"
if_fxp_load="YES"
ipv6_load="NO"
Code:
tftpd: got ERROR packet TFTP aborted
tftpd: Filename '/boot/pxeboot'
tftpd: Mode: octet
tftpd: 192.168.2.7: read request for /boot/pxeboot: success
....
tftpd: Timeout #5 send ACK 31 giving up
1. I have a trimmed-down kernel so the most logical thing I have come up with is that I have not loaded a module that is needed by tftpd/nfsd?
2. How can you customise loader.conf for each diskless client? Surrently as I have only one cleint, I manually re-name the conf I want booted as loader.conf!
Progress on Q1: I copied a generic kernel from CD to the HDD and made the diskless client boot the generic kernel. It had some minor problems but it was able to mount root from nfs (drops to single user but df shows mounted)