On Thu, Mar 21, 2002 at 04:11:11PM -0500, Jack Lloyd wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> This is my first experience using NetBSD, so forgive me if this is
> something that pops up every 2 weeks.
> 
> Basically, I have a SPARCstation2 (named botan) that I am trying to boot
> diskless. The server is my x86 box running Linux (named aisha). I'm using
> NetBSD 1.5.2.
> 
> I've followed the NetBSD Diskless HOWTO fairly closely, setting up a root
> for the machine in /usr/local/netbsd. I did differ from the HOWTO in that I
> put botan's root in /usr/local/netbsd/root/botan, because I have 3 other
> SS2s that I would like to set up in a similiar configuration and that way
> they can share their /usr.
> 
> Anyway, I set up RARP, TFTP, NFS, etc, etc, on aisha, and when I start up
> botan it works great to start out. It finds it's IP, gets the initial boot
> image via TFTP, then mounts the root partition with NFS and boots the main
> kernel. Bootparams seems to be working fine. At this point (right after it
> scans and resets the SCSI bus) I run into trouble. It start's doing
> something like (I'm not near the machine right now so this may not be
> exactly right):
> 
> mount_root: timeout
> mount_root: timeout
> mount_root: timeout
> could not mount root
> And then something about a bootparam error
> 
> [Oh, I'm seeing the console over the serial line, BTW]
> 
> Anyway, using ethereal, what it looks like is that botan starts asking for
> bootparam again, which my portmap then ignores. That seems like a bad

why does it ignores the second request ?

> thing. But I don't get why it's asking for bootparam a second time, when it
> will just be the same thing, and why it thinks the NFS mount has failed,
> when it's already mounted that partition, in order to get the kernel!

These are different things: one if the boot loader, which mounts the filesystem
to load the kernel, and the other is the kernel trying to mount root:
different programs, so the kernel has to do the bootparam dance too to
get the parameters, and then mount root for itself (at this point the
first mount doesn't exist any more because the boot program doesn't exists
any more).

> 
> Another odd thing about bootparamd. The first time it's called, it responds
> with
>    Returning botan   (none)    10.0.0.1
> whereas the Diskless HOWTO says it should be
>    Returning client   (none)    127.0.0.1
> 
> (10.0.0.1 is aisha's IP). Since I don't know squat about bootparamd, I
> don't know if this is relevant or not.

No, bootparamd returning 10.0.0.1 is OK. 

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
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