iSCSI root installs fine but doesn't boot

[Dennis J.]

On 12/11/2008 11:32 PM, Steve Thompson wrote:
> On Thu, 11 Dec 2008, Dennis J. wrote:
>
>> Already tried that. What bugs me is that the installation went through
>> without a hitch which shows that the iscsi setup seems to work fine
>> but after the reboot the laptop doesn't even send out any packet to my
>> desktop and just fails right away.
>
> Dennis,
>
> Just speculating... do you have kernel level autoconfiguration
> (CONFIG_IP_PNP,
> CONFIG_IP_PNP_DHCP) in the kernel being booted?

Nope:

[root at nexus boot]# grep IP_PNP config-2.6.28-0.121.rc7.git5.fc11.i686
# CONFIG_IP_PNP is not set

I also added a "sleep 5" right after the initialisation of eth0 in the 
initrd in case the interface isn't properly initialized before the iscsi 
init and added a "-d 5" to the iscsistart call to get more verbose output:

echo Bringing up eth0
network --device eth0 --bootproto dhcp
sleep 5
echo Attaching to iSCSI storage
/bin/iscsistart -t iqn.1994-04.org.netbsd.iscsi-target:target0 -i 
iqn.2005-03.com.max:01.82ebd2 -d 5 -g 1 -a 192.168.2.100

Unfortunately the debug output doesn't really add any information and the 
connection still simply "fails".

Lastly I booted the rescue cd on the laptop and executed the iscsistart 
line just as it appears in the initrd. The result of that is a new scsi 
device "sdb" popping up in dmesg just as it should.

So I think I can definitely rule out any problems on the server side as the 
install worked fine and iscsistart from the rescue cd works fine too.

What bugs me is that iscsistart doesn't seem to try very hard to get to the 
server. There seems to be no timeout period or any retries. I wonder if 
that means that iscsistart fails to connect to the network/interface at all 
failing so hard that it simply doesn't think a retry is worth the effort.

Regards,
   Dennis