Kickstart and NFS

[Brian D. Haymore]

What hardware are you using in your compute nodes?  What errors show up
on any of the vitual consoles when it fails the NFS mount?

Justin Moore wrote:
> 
> Hello,
>    Due to somewhat frequent disk failures at our cluster, we're working on
> a way to quickly bring a node back up and configured when a replacement
> disk comes in.  The stragegy is to use RedHat's kickstart install to get
> the base system installed from a CD.  The post-installation script then
> attempts to mount an NFS partition and run a series of scripts from that
> partition.  Everything goes well until the host attempts to mount the NFS
> partition.  The mount simply doesn't work.
> 
>    The ks.cfg file statically assigns a constant temp IP address which
> will be blown away when the node reboots and obtains its IP through DHCP.
> The NFS server has the IP address in the /etc/exports file, and syslog on
> the server indicates a successful authenticated mount request from that
> IP.  The distribution is 6.2 for x86 using kernel version 2.2.14.  Looking
> into it more, I find that even a mount request from the command line
> fails, but silently.  Even a simple insmod of the various nfs kernel
> modules (sunrpc, lockd, nfs) fails in the same manner.
> 
>    The kickstart documentation is sadly outdated and full of errors.  I
> have no problem submitting updates or patches to the project, but for now
> I just want my nodes to come up properly and configured by placing a
> floppy and CD in it and turning it on (I'm lazy like that).  I also
> realize this problem is deeper than just kickstart, but I didn't see
> anything on the RedHat-related lists or message boards about kernel module
> problems in 6.2/2.2.14 systems.
> 
>    Has anyone else experienced this, and if so what can I do as a
> work-around?
> 
> Thank you.
> -jdm
> 
> ----------------------------
> Justin Moore
> Assistant Centurion SysAdmin
> University of Virginia
> jdm2d at cs.virginia.edu
> ----------------------------
> 
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--
Brian D. Haymore
University of Utah
Center for High Performance Computing
155 South 1452 East RM 405
Salt Lake City, Ut 84112-0190

Email: brian at chpc.utah.edu - Phone: (801) 585-1755 - Fax: (801) 585-5366