* Re: [gentoo-user] Netboot questions
[not found] ` <20070502124013.GA20036@zombie>
@ 2007-05-10 21:44 ` Dan Farrell
0 siblings, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread
From: Dan Farrell @ 2007-05-10 21:44 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-user
On Wed, 2 May 2007 14:40:13 +0200
Jan Seeger <jan.seeger@gmail.com> wrote:
> Ah yes sorry there. Then I cannot help you, since I have no experience
> using netboot/pxe. Sorry
> Greetings Jan Seeger
Well, dave, I look to be one of the few who have done this. I think I
can give you a hand.
> 1. I can still compile/emerge on the frontend but its very slow as its
> on NFS. Can I compile on the server by chrooting? Basicallly I want to
> know if I can compile on EMT64 targeting AMD64. The frontend was
> installed with stage 1 so I guess the compiler won't even run in a
> chroot'ed environment.
Various NFS tweaks can help with this. The biggest difference I
noticed was allowing async NFS mounting -- and a substantial difference
it was. During an emerge (genlop in this case) My sync-mounted router
'davey' gets about 2M or less per second on the server's hard drive,
whereas the async-mounted 'slim' achieves speeds more on a reasonable
scale of 5M or more; lag is significantly lower as well. After
emerging I wanted to show what genlop said of the install speeds...
| davey linux # genlop -i genlop
| Global build time: 32 seconds.
compared to
| slim ~ # genlop genlop -i
| Global build time: 7 seconds.
I didn't think such a small package was a very good example, so a
dependancy, DateManip, is also shown:
| davey linux # genlop DateManip -i
| Global build time: 7 minutes and 31 seconds.
compared to
| slim ~ # genlop -i DateManip
| Global build time: 27 seconds.
Here's the server export options from exportfs:
| /nfsroot/davey 192.168.1.1(rw,wdelay,no_root_squash)
| /nfsroot/slim 192.168.1.86(rw,async,wdelay,no_root_squash)
And from fstab on the clients:
| 192.168.1.87:/nfsroot/slim / nfs rw,async,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 0 0
| 192.168.1.87:/nfsroot/davey / nfs
| noauto,wsize=1024,rsize=1024,sync,noatime 0 0
Although the async mount was scary at first, I haven't had any
problems. slim is my media PC.
>2. The Gensplash is compiled into the kernel. It appears at startup
>with the 'Initialising kernel' screen but the progress bar never
>appears.
I'm not a gentoo spash user, but I'd wager you need to provide the
splashscreen images and whatnot to the kernel. The kernel and any
initrd/initramfs images must live on the TFTP server to be provided to
PXE, and I would imagine the same thing would be true of a
splashscreen.
>3. My DHCP server issues static routes, but since I've made the
>frontend boot over PXE (static IP address) it never gets the routes.
>Any ideas?
Contrary to popular opinion, there's nothing wrong with using dhcp to
assign ip information -- At least, that is one of the few things that
my net-booters haven't suffered from. My kernel invocation is
something like
| DEFAULT /bzImage.davey.2.6.19.new
| APPEND ip=dhcp root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.1.87:/nfsroot/davey
As you can see, I use PXE-Linux and I recommend it. (I would be
interested to hear from you if you got PXE-Grub working because I never
did.) the useful /usr/src/linux/Documentation/nfsboot.txt suggests
that:
| ip=<client-ip>:<server-ip>:<gw-ip>:<netmask>:<hostname>:<device>:<autoconf>
|
| This parameter tells the kernel how to configure IP addresses of
|devices and also how to set up the IP routing table.
This option might solve the problem, but I'd think you'd have better
luck using dhcp as I do.
Best of luck,
Dan
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