freebsd stable - Jul 2011 - diskless booting with 8.2 regression?

Hi all,

I just updated my nfs/tftp server for diskless booting from 8.0-rel to
8.2-stable. I have a bunch of Linux clients that used to work with the
8.0-setup, but fail to boot now.

On the server side I see

Jul 18 11:18:24 mclane tftpd[72434]: Got ERROR packet: TFTP Aborted

in the log/messages, but the Linux kernel appears to be transferred over
the net just fine (so this is probably not the real issue). It starts to
boot and fails at some later point (with no apparent error message on
screen) causing an endless reboot loop.
I already googled for quite some time on this now, but nothing useful
came up. The error message above seems to be harmless, at least the
machines of people reporting them work nevertheless.

Are there any known issues/regressions with tftp/nfs diskless booting? I
read in some posts that people were vaguely "having problems" with it
when
updating to 8.2-something, but could not find any details. Are there any
further hints what I could do to narrow down the problem?


cu
  Gerrit

On Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:38:22 +0200 Gerrit K?hn
<gerrit@pmp.uni-hannover.de> wrote about diskless booting with 8.2
regression?:

I guess I found the root of all evil now: device nodes on zfs!

This is how a linux /dev/console looked on the 8.0-FreeBSD server on
zfsv15:

crw-------  1 root  wheel    5,   1 Oct 28	2010
/tank/diskless/gco-fe2/dev/console


Now, after updating to FreeBSD-8.2 and zfsv28 it looks like this on the server:

crw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  255, 0xffff00ff Jul 18 16:33
/tank/diskless/pt-fe2/dev/console


Strange enough, the Linux client still displays the correct values when using
"ls -la", but it refuses to work properly.
I tried creating new device nodes from the client side with mknod and I tried
getting correct ones from a backup, but they always end up being broken. Even
movong the directories over to a ufs volume leaves them unusable:

crw-r--r--  1 root  wheel    0,   0 Jul 18 16:33 /tmp/console


Luckily, I am back into business now with my machines, because moving the stuff
from zfs to ufs and dropping in a correct version of /dev on the ufs side works
just fine.

However, it would be great if this could be fixed, because I do not have many
ufs partitions left these days...


cu
  Gerrit



GK> Hi all,
GK> 
GK> I just updated my nfs/tftp server for diskless booting from 8.0-rel to
GK> 8.2-stable. I have a bunch of Linux clients that used to work with the
GK> 8.0-setup, but fail to boot now.
GK> 
GK> On the server side I see
GK> 
GK> Jul 18 11:18:24 mclane tftpd[72434]: Got ERROR packet: TFTP Aborted
GK> 
GK> in the log/messages, but the Linux kernel appears to be transferred
GK> over the net just fine (so this is probably not the real issue). It
GK> starts to boot and fails at some later point (with no apparent error
GK> message on screen) causing an endless reboot loop.
GK> I already googled for quite some time on this now, but nothing useful
GK> came up. The error message above seems to be harmless, at least the
GK> machines of people reporting them work nevertheless.
GK> 
GK> Are there any known issues/regressions with tftp/nfs diskless booting?
GK> I read in some posts that people were vaguely "having problems"
with
GK> it when updating to 8.2-something, but could not find any details. Are
GK> there any further hints what I could do to narrow down the problem?
GK> 
GK> 
GK> cu
GK>   Gerrit
GK> _______________________________________________
GK> freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list
GK> http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
GK> To unsubscribe, send any mail to
GK> "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
GK>