NFS-root mounting problem

[Jakob Oestergaard]

On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 01:11:06PM -0400, Michael Prinkey wrote:
> We ran into a similar problem in building a netboot cluster.  The 
> normal startup process is trying to mount the root partition again.
> What you really need to do is remount it and make sure it is rw.
> You can try that.  I think it might require changing the rc.sysinit 
> script.  Or perhaps just take the root listing out of /etc/fstab

Ok - I tried many variations on this, to no avail.

>From "cat /proc/mounts", I see that the root filesystem is indeed
mounted read-write.

One thing that I stumbled across was, that it is always mounted as
NFSv2, while both client and server support NFSv3.

If I put a "nfsvers=3" in the fstab for the home filesystem, mount
complains that NFSv3 is not supported - although this is enabled both at
the server-side and the client-side.  And it's standard RedHat 7.2 so it
should work (and does work in the non-root-nfs case on many other
systems here).

If I make pxelinux tell the kernel to mount the root filesystem as NFSv3
initially, it ignores the option silently and mounts as v2.

I don't know if that has anything to do with the problem at all...

> 
> FWIW, we found the whole root NFS approach to be more trouble than 
> it was worth.  Instead, we built a 4MB ramdisk and used it as /. 
> Then we have several ro mounts that go to /bin, /usr, etc. which 
> are used for all of the nodes in the cluster and only have rw /tmp 
> and /var for each node.

Yes, I've been re-re-re-booting for quite some hours now, and I think
I'm running out of things to test (at least what I could come up with
and what I could read from the net).

If no one else can suggest anything for me to try, I will build a
ramdisk tomorrow.

Thanks,

-- 
................................................................
:   jakob at unthought.net   : And I see the elder races,         :
:.........................: putrid forms of man                :
:   Jakob Østergaard      : See him rise and claim the earth,  :
:        OZ9ABN           : his downfall is at hand.           :
:.........................:............{Konkhra}...............:
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