[Ltsp-discuss] Remote Boot; not quite LTSP

[David N. <nap...@co...>]

In my quest for a totally silent workstation, I've removed the hard 
drive from one of my computers, installed that same hard drive into my 
local server, and exported it via NFS. It now boots over the network 
just like before, but stops working before I can really use it. If I 
start with runlevel 1, that works just fine; then I can enable sshd and 
remotely log into the machine, run graphical apps on my laptop, etc. 
Runlevel 3 starts up and, at the moment the login prompt is displayed, 
the workstation stops responding to pings; typing a username locks up 
that terminal, but I can still switch terminals with ctrl+alt+function. 
Runlevel 5 starts up and apparently crashes when starting X. It stops 
responding to pings at the same point and the screen goes black. I can't 
tell if it actually switched video modes or not.

Confused? The relevant configs will help. Here are the commands I use 
for booting the workstation: this is just a 4 gig USB thumb drive with 
GRUB2 + kernel + initrd (generated with network support by dracut):

root (hd0,1)
linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.30.9-96-fc11-x86_64 
root=nfs:192.168.0.72:/media/Fedora-11-x86_64,rw #(and a runlevel)
initrd /boot/initrd-2.6.30.9-96-fc11-x86_64.netboot.img
boot

On the server (192.168.0.72 aka 'ranty') here is 
/media/Fedora-11-x86_64/etc/fstab:
#
# /etc/fstab
# Created by anaconda on Mon Nov 9 21:47:13 2009
192.168.0.72:/media/Fedora-11-x86_64 / nfs rw 0 0
192.168.0.72:/home /home nfs rw 0 0
tmpfs /dev/shm tmpfs defaults 0 0
devpts /dev/pts devpts gid=5,mode=620 0 0
#devpts options modified by setup update to fix #515521 ugly way
sysfs /sys sysfs defaults 0 0
proc /proc proc defaults 0 0

On the server (ranty) here is /etc/exports:
/home 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0(rw,sync,no_root_squash,tcp)
/media/Fedora-11-x86_64 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0(rw,sync,no_root_squash,tcp)

I feel like I'm really close to getting this to work and I spent an hour 
online with someone in #dracut who helped me get to this point; I know 
this isn't strictly LTSP but it seems like a related problem, remote 
booting; does anyone here know what I need to do to make it really work?

Thanks,
David Nielson