[gentoo-user] Netboot questions

[gentoo-user] Netboot questions

[Dave Oxley]

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I have a EMT64 server that runs a mythtv backend as well as other things
and a AMD64 mythtv frontend which has been running with its own hard
disk and therefore install of Gentoo for sometime. I am looking at
building another frontend without a disk so I thought I'd experiment
with my current frontend. I have managed to get it booting using PXE, I
copied the hard disk contents to a directory on my server and followed
the rest of the howto, but I have the following questions/problems:

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.

2. The Gensplash is compiled into the kernel. It appears at startup with
the 'Initialising kernel' screen but the progress bar never appears. It
just shows that screen until X is started. Any ideas what might be wrong
here or where I should start to look?

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?

Cheers for any help,
Dave.
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Re: [gentoo-user] Netboot questions

[Jan Seeger]

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Concerning Number 2:
You need to have gensplash enabled in the Kernel (which it is), and have
emerged the splashutils packages. Also, you need to modify your grub.conf
to use a framebuffer. Furthermore, you need to create an initial ramdisk
to load the images early in the booting process. May I point you to the
wiki article on the gentoo wiki "Howto Bootsplash"?
Greetings
jeeger
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Re: [gentoo-user] Netboot questions

[Dan Farrell]

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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