Re: Booting Sun3/50 Diskless from Serving PC

[David Johnson <electronsciences%bellsouth.net@localhost>]

I'm not booting to multi-user mode but it's not quite time to ring the 
soup bell:

I get two warnings during boot to multi-user mode as follows:
Building databases:
KVM_mkdb: machdep.booted_kernel: the value is not available: no such 
file or dir

and the second more troublesome one:
mount_nfs: g21:/export/sun350/swap on /swap  not a directory
swapctl: g21:/export/sun350/swap mount failed

/export/sun350/root/etc/fstab has the following line in it for swap:
g21:/export/sun350/swap none swap sw,nfsmntpt=/swap
g21:/export/sun350/root  /       nfs    r,w

Yet, as recommended in the previous e-mail, the directory 
/export/sun350/root/swap  is really there as well as
/export/sun350/swap    this one is a file.  I enlarged it to 16 Mbytes

Sun350 appears to basically running though I'm not sure how it manages 
to get fully booted in mult-user mode without a swap file.  I only have 
4Mbytes of memory.

David Brownlee wrote:
> On Thu, 5 Mar 2009, David Johnson wrote:
>
> > I moved all of my various individual exports directories as they were 
> > shown in the NFS Diskless Boot Howto  to /export/root as you 
> > suggested in your email:
> >     *WAS                                                           IS*
> > /export/sun350/root                                     
> > /export/sun350/root
> > /export/sun350/swap  (is an 8Mbyte file)  -->  /export/sun350/root/swap
> > /export/sun350/usr /export/sun350/root/usr
> > /export/sun350/home /export/sun350/root/home
> >
> > My etc/exports now looks like this:
> > #/etc/export
> > /   -maproot:root:wheel -alldirs   sun350.grid.net         <---- this 
> > works without complaint from mountd
>
>     Now you have your exports like that you should also be able to
>     mount home and usr as separate filesystems if you want (though
>     personally I would leave them as they are)
>
> > I can boot diskless to single user mode but I'm still having trouble 
> > getting swap to work.  Your comment about /export being a separate 
> > file system on my server raises questions.  I simply did a mkdir 
> > /export to create this tree on my server.  But what I'm ending up 
> > with is completely different from what the NFS diskless Howto shows 
> > for setup.  I'm wondering what happened in my case and why am I 
> > ending up so different from the HOWTO description?
>
>     I suspect part of it could be related to additional checks
>     that NetBSD added a while back to prevent multiple NFS
>     exports of the same base filesystem, so /etc/exports configs
>     that used to work no longer do.
>
>     The diskless howto definitely needs some updating.
>
>     For the swap file can you try:
>     - move the swap file to /export/sun350/swap
>     - create a directory /export/sun350/root/swap
>     - Try the following in fstab on the client
>       server:/export/sun350/swap none swap sw,nfsmntpt=/swap
>
>     (According to the swapctl manpage that *should* work).

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