[tech] netbooting machines

[James Andrewartha]

Maroon wasn't booting after the cleanup, investigation revealed the 
network card's BIOS wasn't running. Putting it in a different slot helped, 
although by that point I'd written an etherboot floppy as well. It then 
booted, but couldn't find the nfs server to mount its root filesystem. 
Googling suggested removing IPAPPEND 1 from the pxelinux.cfg, which worked.

I've also updated the kernels on the blackboxes to 2.6.18, as hal refused 
to work with 2.6.12 (hence the need to modprobe usbmouse on boot). This 
went ok, however the script that bind mounted /mnt/{ip} didn't work 
because ifconfig needs /proc mounted, so I added a manual mount. For sheer 
pendantry I also installed a patched version of mount that allows the use 
of a symlinked /etc/mtab using the patch from 
http://gentoo-wiki.com/index.php?title=HOWTO_Read-only_root_filesystem#mtab 
Oh, and they have a crontab of @reboot /bin/mount -a because nfs 
filesystems are mounted when a network card in /etc/network/interfaces is 
brought up, which doesn't happen because the kernel does it.


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