Re: Booting Sun3/50 Diskless from Serving PC

[David Brownlee <abs%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Sun, 1 Mar 2009, David Johnson wrote:

> I think the problems may be related to permissions.  I am able export root
> but that is the only one which behaves properly.  I can boot to single user
> mode on the 3/50 and can list my / directory (attached -lF listing
> sun350~1.txt).  When I try to mount /usr from the Sun350 it says permission
> denied.  Neither can I access the swap file remotely.

        As an aside, unless you want to share a single exported '/usr'
        across multiple client boxes, then it probably makes more
        sense to put export/.../usr as export/.../root/usr and
        avoid that extra export and mount.

        I good few years back I had a single /root mountpoint shared
        across multiple machines with a little logic in /etc to
        conditionalise config setup based on dhcp hostname, but
        that is getting further off topic.

> Similarly, mountd complains about my /export/sun350/usr and home
> directorys.  I have attached a -lF listing of my /export tree for
> inspection.
>
> I've tried -alldirs option on all of the various levels of the /export
> directory.
> /export -alldirs sun350.grid.net
> /export/sun350 -alldirs sun350.grid.net
> /export/sun350/root sun350.grid.net
> /export -alldirs -maproot:0 sun350.grid.net
> mountd complains every time with that option (server is running netbsd3.1)

        Is /export a separate filesystem on your server? If not,
        on netbsd3.1 I think you may need to have

            / -maproot:root:wheel -alldirs sun350.grid.net

        Anyway - move sun350/usr to sun350/root/usr to simplify matters.

> Only the following line will get me to single user boot:
> /export/sun350/root -maproot:root:wheel sun350.grid.net
>
> From the sun3 console, I can see the exported file system but I can't do
> anything with it.  Hence my suspicion of file/directory permisions.

        It does sound like permissions - on the client can you
        create or alter files in /tmp (assuming that has the correct
        chmod 1777 on the server). If the server isn't mapping the client
        root access as root then it should end up creating files as
        nobody in sun350/root/tmp

> I also attached my process list:  I think everyting is running that should
> be.  I wonder why I have so many nfsd processes running.  If you spot any
> other abberations in the process list please point them out.  I'm not expert
> on this stuff, and am trying to learn.

        That stuff looks fine... there are multiple nfsds to support
        concurrency - each one can be handling a separate IO request
        from a client

--
                David/absolute       -- www.NetBSD.org: No hype required --