Stateless Works! but...
Carlos Knowlton
cknowlton at science.edu
Wed Nov 17 14:39:56 UTC 2004
>>I finally got a diskless machine to boot from a stateless server!
>>There are a lot of "can't do that on a read-only filesystem" messages,
>>at boot, and I can't login, there must be something I'm missing.
>>
>>
>
> Where exactly is it breaking?
>
> Are you sure the snapshot process completed correctly, that the
>readonly-root package is installed on the snapshot etc.?
>
>
>
The snapshot seemed to install smoothly, but I'm not sure if no errors
means "correctly". I did verify that "read-only root" and
"stateless-clients" is installed on the snapshot.
This is what's happening:
-The client boots
-Finds dhcp/PXE on the stateless server, and installs the kernel
-initrd does a pivot-root to the NFS-mounted snapshot, (and here's where
things get interesting)
-when rc.readonlyroot runs, I get a series of "find: cannot access
[file]: permission denied"
-then when the rest of the processes start to run, some work, some
fail. These fail:
-CUPS
-nfslock
-netfs (this just hangs for a few minutes, and then RPC time's out)
-xfs
-nscd
Since netfs won't mount NFS filesystems, I don't have access to user
data folders, though I was finally able to get it to login (LDAP didn't
like plain-text user passwords =).
Anyway, the file permissions are the thing that seem to be causing most
of the trouble. Everything that isn't world-readable is inaccessible,
even to root! (why is that?) Though I tried to make everything on the
snapshot in /etc and /var world-readable, this was a mistake, because
though some things worked, others broke, I assume because they didn't
like their private files exposed like this. Either way, I still
couldn't get nfs exports to mount right.
>>Is there a "post-image-installation" document describing how to overcome
>>these problems? Also, I had to figure out how to use the
>>"stateless-servers" command to add the nfs/rsync paths before the cron
>>job would work that configured the client pxelinux files under
>>/tftpboot. I may have overlooked it somehow, but shouldn't that be in
>>the tutorial?
>>
>>
>
> Ah, yes that should be in the tutorial. Patches for the tutorial are
>very, very welcome :-)
>
>Cheers,
>Mark.
>
>
>
I'd love to, but... Hmm, ever thought of wiki-fying the tutorial? I'm
still pretty new, I haven't learned the fine art of patch generating yet.
Thanks for all your help!
Carlos
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