Re: [SSI-users] gPXE booting node hangs after "loading initrd.........ready."

[Scott W. <sc...@sl...>]

Assuming that gPXE is malfunctioning in a different way than I've seen
before, maybe try a 3com card with a bootrom on it.  eBay sellers
seldom identify and advertise the feature, but if you dig through
enough listing photos, eventually you'll find one that has the
EPROM/ROM position on the board populated (large dual-inline-pin chip
without many pins for its size).

-scott

On 12/14/10, Scott Walters <sc...@sl...> wrote:
>> mkinitrd -o /tftpboot/initrd 2.6.12-ssi-686-smp
>> cpio: initrd/lib/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 not created: newer or same age
>> version
>> exists
>> cpio: initrd/lib/libcluster.so.0 not created: newer or same age version
>> exists
>> 6488+0 records in
>> 6488+0 records out
>> 6643712 bytes (6.6 MB) copied, 0.433489 s, 15.3 MB/s
>> mke2fs 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
>> cpio: ./dev/ida: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
>> cpio: ./dev/scsi: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
>> cpio: ./dev/ide: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
>> cpio: ./dev/mapper: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
>> cpio: ./dev/md: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
>> cpio: ./dev/cciss: Cannot stat: No such file or directory
>> 10189 blocks
>> /tftpboot/initrd:        69.5% -- replaced with /tftpboot/initrd.gz
>
> Looks sane enough.
>
>> Ethernet controller: 3Com Corporation 3c905C-TX/TX-M [Tornado] (rev 78)
>
>> This is a 4-cpu machine and has always ran with a 686 kernel in the past
>> so
>> I'm not convinced its a kernel issue, tho I am no expert.  Any help would
>> be
>> greatly appreciated.  Thanks in advance.
>
> Usually I see things go wrong different ways.  You get the usual dmesg
> startup scroll and then it can't find the NIC it was added to the
> cluster with, or gPXE fails to bring the card online and netboot at
> all, or a few other things.
>
> I don't have a good lead on this one, but tell me about your
> bootloader setup on the initnode, the first machine.  Are you using
> grub?  What does the grub.conf look like?
>
> Even if you aren't booting the initnode with grub, ssi-ksync expects a
> correct grub.conf and uses that to generate the netboot materials.
> But if the kernel went over, I'd at least expect it to try to boot it,
> even if it didn't make it very far.
>
> Maybe grab an old version of your favorite distro from about the same
> era as the 2.6.12 kernel and try to boot that?  In theory, all of the
> really important hardware should be back compat.
>
> Sorry I'm not much use here...
>
> Good luck,
> -scott
>
>>
>> Shane
>>
>