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General => Installation issues => Topic started by: finsdown on February 21, 2008, 01:43:44 am

Title: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on February 21, 2008, 01:43:44 am
Ok, got a strange one here, where I PXEBOOT a pc and everything goes Haywire. I'm at a loss to why. 

Here's the situation:  I deleted one of my MDs because I kept on getting a video error message with the Nvidia drivers.  I went into webadmin and deleted the MD from the system.  Then I PXEbooted and the pc did the usual thing about announcing itself to the Core. Next it runs the DHCP_?.sh script, then the NFS? script.  Immediately after that it reboots and repeats these steps over again and again and again. 

Meanwhile on the Core/Hybrid I get a message saying "this seems to be a new orbiter, shall I set it up for you?"  Next the LMCE babe video starts up. Then I go into the LMCE webadmin tool and notice there is a new orbiter listed there, and also a new Media Director device created. The room listed for the new MD is same room my Core is in.  Well I already have a MD at that location. So it appears that LMCE is trying to create another one there.  This seems to confuse everything including me.  I tried changing the room location for it to where I wanted it to be but it won't stick.  I also get messages telling me such and such device #183 is invalid, shall I delete it. Hell yea, delete it for me.  Then once I delete the rabid Media director and the wayward orbiter in webadmin, things seeem to settle back down.   

So I'm wondering what has happened.  Did I screw something up when I deleted the MD?  I'm now unable to re-establish the MD I wanted to put back in the system. 

Thanks,

fins



Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: darrenmason on February 21, 2008, 03:39:48 am
Maybe re-run the "Setup Diskless Media Directors" button?

Maybe first, try deleting the old MD's filesystem from your core /home/diskless/XX or something like that.

HTH
Darren
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on February 21, 2008, 05:34:54 pm
I think with 0710 that using the "Setup Diskless Media Director"  is no longer used??? Not sure. I tried that but it didn't work. Also the /home/diskless/XX filesystem for that device # is not there, so I'm assuming it's gone. I think the key to my problem is with the Media Director and it's continuous rebooting.  It starts the PXE boot fine, announces itself to the Core, starts running the installation shell scripts, and then reboots, and starts this whole process over again. I noticed that it doesn't even create the /home/diskless/XX filesystem at all, even though a device # is assigned to it when the Core detects the new MD. However, in LMCE admin the new MD is listed.  Some might say just rebuild the Core, but I've got too much time invested in getting the Core running to do this (only as a last resort anyway).   

Thanks,
Fins
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: colinjones on February 21, 2008, 10:25:12 pm
finsdown - long shot, but when you PXE boot to start building your MD (after you have deleted the old one) what is the first IP address it gets from the core? Is it getting one from your "unknown" devices range (I think this is the higher range) or the lower "MD" range of IP addresses?

If it is the lower one, this could be the problem - the Core maybe remembering the MD from its MAC address and putting it straight into the MD range which in turn may be screwing up the auto discovery scripts in some way I don't understand. Normally, it should get a high IP address as it doesn't recognise the device, builds itself, then reboots and gets a lower address.
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on February 22, 2008, 12:11:33 am
colinjones - yes it is getting the lower ip address 1(92.168.80.2) and I think your are right on about the core remembering the mac address from the previous MD.  Now how I wonder if  I can tell the core to not do this?  I thought maybe I could use a different network card, since I do have some spares, and that would be get around it. But I'd rather fix the problem than work around it.  Ideas?

Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: colinjones on February 22, 2008, 12:17:06 am
It may not be causing the problem... but if you look in /etc/dhcp3 you should find the config file and that contains the leases against MACs. You can delete it from there. Now in my experience this doesn't always stop it from remembering.... don't know why cos it is definitely related to it. But sometimes I have had to dick around a bit before it "forgot" but that was with PC shares where the DHCP client actively requests the old address. With PXE I doubt very much if this is stored in CMOS so maybe it will be easier for you...
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: Zaerc on February 22, 2008, 02:29:42 pm
You might have to do some cleaning up under /tftpboot/ as well.
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on February 22, 2008, 06:39:48 pm
Thanks for the ideas. I will try these and post my results.

Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: royw on February 25, 2008, 06:29:08 am
Under Wizards, Media Directors, I did a "Rebuild Image" on my diskless MD when it was constantly rebooting.  That solved the problem for me.  I did have to go thru the AV setup wizard again.

HTH,
Roy
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: jondecker76 on February 25, 2008, 06:48:31 am
Wow, this is the EXACT thing that is happening to me - only I have never tried to install another media director before (I only have a core/hybrid right now, and never attempted to install any other md's). THis was the first media director I was going to PXE boot - and on the first attempt onward, I get the same behavior - Announces itsself to the router, then I can quickly see a DHCP...sh and NFS script, the word Rebooting.. than pow, it reboots and the process starts over. Mine was also assigned an IP of .80.2

Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on February 25, 2008, 06:52:28 pm
Good to know I'm not alone in the wilderness.  I haven't had time to try these ideas yet. I've been busy with other issues on my other MD's. I have a Core/Hybrid in the LR and a MD in the MBR that are working fairly well, except the frequent lockups with MythTV.

I will post my results when I get around to this MD again. 

Cheers -

Fins
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: jondecker76 on February 25, 2008, 11:36:48 pm
Here are the last few things I see before the system reboots. (and the process starts all over again)
(I had to take a picture of the screen with a digital camera and type it all out...)
Code: [Select]
....
....
....
[  113.151024] e1000: eth0: e1000_watchdog: NIC Link is Up 1000Mbps Full Duplex, Flow Control: RX/TX
IP-Config: Eth0 guessed broadcast address 192.168.80.255
IP-Config: Eth0 complete (from 192.168.80.1):
  address: 192.168.80.2        broadcast: 192.168.80.255      netmask: 255.255.255.0
  gateway: 192.168.80.1        dns0       : 192.168.80.1         dns1     : 0.0.0.0
  rootserver: 192.168.80.1 rootpath:
  filename  : /tftpboot/pxelinux.0
Begin:  Running /scripts/nfs-premount ...
IP:  192.168.80.2; MAC:  00:1B:21:10:99:A5  ; Gateway:  192.168.80.1;  Architecture: i386;  DT:
***********************************
* We announced ourselves to the router. *
***********************************
Assigned permanent IP '192.168.80.2' to device '60'
Running Diskless_Setup.sh
[  116.840862] scsi 0:0:0:0:  Direct-Access        HP     Photosmart C3180 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
Running DHCP_config.sh
Running Diskless_ExportsNFS.sh
Rebooting
[  124.271625] md: stopping all md devices.

the part that is really confusing is this:
Quote
[  116.840862] scsi 0:0:0:0:  Direct-Access        HP     Photosmart C3180 1.00 PQ: 0 ANSI: 2
The HP Photosmart C3180 is my printer... What does that have to do with PXE booting??
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: hari on February 25, 2008, 11:50:58 pm
(I had to take a picture of the screen with a digital camera and type it all out...)
gives a new sense to the word hardcopy ;)

did it create a file like that:
Code: [Select]
hari@dcerouter:/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg$ more 01-00-19-de-ad-be-ef
DEFAULT Pluto
LABEL Pluto
KERNEL 68/vmlinuz
APPEND initrd=68/initrd.img ramdisk=10240 rw root=/dev/nfs boot=nfs nfsroot=192.168.80.1:/usr/pluto/diskless/68

?

best regards,
Hari
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: Zaerc on February 25, 2008, 11:51:37 pm
Can you see the MD's files under /usr/pluto/diskless/# and/or /tfptboot on the core?  Does it have an entry in the web-admin?  If so you can try letting it rebuild or if not you could try adding it manually and specify the MAC and IP addresses.
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: jondecker76 on February 26, 2008, 02:33:45 am
Here are some results after trying some suggestions:

Code: [Select]
linuxmce@dcerouter:~$ :/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg$ more 01-00-19-de-ad-be-ef
-bash: :/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg$: No such file or directory
linuxmce@dcerouter:~$ :/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg  more 01-00-19-de-ad-be-ef
-bash: :/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg: No such file or directory
linuxmce@dcerouter:~$

Code: [Select]
llinuxmce@dcerouter:~$ cd /usr/pluto/diskless
-bash: cd: /usr/pluto/diskless: No such file or directory


Code: [Select]
linuxmce@dcerouter:/$ cd /tftpboot
linuxmce@dcerouter:/tftpboot$ dir
cnu70.2-7-4-134.sbn    Jar70.2-9-0-117.sbn    term70.default.loads
CVM70.2-0-0-112.sbn    pxelinux.0             United_States
default                pxelinux.cfg
English_United_States  TERM70.7-0-1-0s.loads


Also, there are no MD's listed on the web admin (other than my Core/Hybrid)

Something just hit me.....
The computer I am trying to network boot is the computer I normally use for my personal computing. It is running Ubuntu 7.10. I installed the XP version of the orbiter on it, and I run it through wine. The device ID listed on the orbiter page is 60. Is this what is causing the problem?
What about the HP Photosmart printer appearing in the PXE boot text - what is that all about?
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: hari on February 26, 2008, 08:56:12 am
Here are some results after trying some suggestions:

Code: [Select]
linuxmce@dcerouter:~$ :/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg$ more 01-00-19-de-ad-be-ef
-bash: :/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg$: No such file or directory
linuxmce@dcerouter:~$ :/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg  more 01-00-19-de-ad-be-ef
-bash: :/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg: No such file or directory
linuxmce@dcerouter:~$
of course you have to substitue the MAC for the one of your MD.

best regards,
Hari
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on February 26, 2008, 05:38:25 pm
Hari -It looks like there are 2 of us having exact same issue. I haven't had time to work on this, but tonight I will.  I assume that if this file exists on dcerouter, I should delete or rename it, then start the PXEBOOT again?


Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: hari on February 26, 2008, 07:21:00 pm
Hari -It looks like there are 2 of us having exact same issue. I haven't had time to work on this, but tonight I will.  I assume that if this file exists on dcerouter, I should delete or rename it, then start the PXEBOOT again?



i assume if the MD loops at installation it's missing that generated file..

best regards,
Hari
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on February 27, 2008, 04:16:35 pm
I see the same output on my MD.  After booting the MD, it reboots and repeats the following scripts, reboots, runs scripts, reboots....

Running Diskless_Setup.sh
Running DHCP_config.sh
Running Diskless_ExportsNFS.sh

Meanwhile on the Core I begin getting discovery messages for a new orbiter.  Why a new orbiter? It's a MD, not a orbiter.
Webadmin shows a new MD has been added though. 

This is screwed up. Is there anything in the SQLcvs that would cause this situation? All I did was delete the MD using webadmin and tried to re-build it with PXEboot.  Is there a sql utility to detect database corruption and fix it? 

Thanks,

Fins







Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on February 28, 2008, 03:34:06 pm
Well I've tried every suggestion on this topic and still I can't get this particular MD to pxeboot properly.  I've tried to develop an understanding of the process of network booting PXE clients, and read some good wiki documentation on the subject, but there doesn't seem to be an indepth documentation of the process from start to finish of the process.

I tried playing around with manually creating the directory and file structure needed to boot, i.e. I created a file called 01-{mac address} in the pxelinux.cfg directory (actually copied from another MD and renamed to correspond to failing MD's mac address and modified it with it's device #), manually created a directory called /tftpboot/{device#} and copied vmlinuz & initrd.img into it, plus created a directory called /usr/pluto/diskless/{device number}.  This  seemed to work up to a point. The MD would boot, receive it's assigned IP address, load vmlinuz & initrd.img, but then would stop with an error saying it could not mount pre-exportnfs (can't remember exactly now).

I also tried creating the MD manually in lmce admin, put in the mac address and "setup diskless w/s" but this didn't work either.


So if any of you gurus out there who might have any experience with the pxeboot process can point me in the right direction I would appreciate it very much. 

BTW, I think I will try to put in a pci 100mbit ethernet card into this MD once I can locate one and see if it can boot with it.  I wonder if the whole diskless MD creation thing is fubared or if it is just this one MD.


Fins
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: Marper on March 01, 2008, 12:53:11 am
I've had the same problem and in all cases it appeared to be a problem with my Mobo BIOS.  I disabled overclocking and set to standard, I also disabled hyperthreading as this one appeared to be the most problematic.  In addtion, I've had to on server MD's turn off any temp control for CPU and ensure that I did not exceed the DRAM post for the Video in the BIOS.  I set the BIOS to min 64 on some 128k.  After taking these steps I was able to sucessfully re-configure the MD.  I've had this problem over and over anytime a hardware item changed on core of MD.  Also, after looking over these items, delete the MD and recreate it in the wizard.  I hope this helps.
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on March 06, 2008, 03:01:04 am
Well I am totally Fobared now I think. Nothing but a rebuild of my core is left for me to try. I bought a new NIC and it started the PXE boot perfectly fine all the way up to the point where /usr/pluto/bin/Diskless_ExportsNFS.sh runs. At this point the MD reboots and repeats the steps of PXE booting. Examining the /tfttpboot directory shows no device id directory is created for the new MD.  What is the world could be causing this? Anyone?  I believe at this point I will not be able to add anymore MD's until this is solved.  Luckily I have my core/hybrid and my one working MD already.

I really would not relish the thought of rebuilding the core. However, if I do, what can I do to minimize the work? In other words, can I backup up the database? Does anybody possibly think this a database problem causing this.  I noticed in LMCEadmin that there is a warning about deleting MD's causing database corruption. Maybe this is what happening?
Title: TRY THIS - Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: Marper on March 16, 2008, 07:34:01 pm
Hi finsdown - I know this problem is really a pain I have had the same thing happen at least 4 times now and I'm not sure what caused it.  in the last 72 hours I went through another spell of the mysterious fight with MCE and could not get my MD to re-install.  Finally I was able to and I hope this helps you.

First - I went into Network Settings through Admin and changed the network setting for DHCP devices to start at 100.

Second - I reloaded the router and rebooted the Core

Third - I went back and reset the Network settings to their original settings

fourth - I ran the setup diskless in the MD Section

and last - I started up my first MD and it all installed correctly.  Just now finishing up my 5 MD in the home today. 

What's odd, is everytime this has happened, I've had to take different steps to get back on track and that worries me.

Hope this helps
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on March 24, 2008, 06:05:08 pm
Well in the end just rebuilding the system was what I did. Actually, it didn't take as long as before because I saved all the documentation I need to get it up and running - like the drivers for my Intel  soundcard. For some reason the ALSA drivers aren't  part of the distribution and I have to "make install" them into the kernel.  That took days to figure out the 1st time, but now it's a 15 minute fix.

Anyway a long story short, after rebuilding from scratch I was able to add my MD's again.  I think the moral of the story is be very careful when deleting MD's from Webadmin - which makes me wonder how do you delete an unwanted MD without compromising the system?

Thanks for your suggestions.



Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: royw on March 24, 2008, 06:16:38 pm
Well in the end just rebuilding the system was what I did. Actually, it didn't take as long as before because I saved all the documentation I need to get it up and running - like the drivers for my Intel  soundcard. For some reason the ALSA drivers aren't  part of the distribution and I have to "make install" them into the kernel.  That took days to figure out the 1st time, but now it's a 15 minute fix.

Can you post your procedure for installing the ALSA drivers?  I've just concluded that is what I need to do for my diskless MD.

TIA,
Roy
Title: Re: Strange Media Director PXEBOOT behavior - FUbar'ed
Post by: finsdown on March 24, 2008, 06:55:23 pm
Here's the link to the procedure to compile the Intel hda sound module: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Matrix:Module-hda-intel

Click on the "downloads" to get the 1) alsa-driver 1.0.16  2) alsa-lib 1.0.16 3) alsa-utils 1.0.16.

Follow the directions to "make install" the modules.  I didn't have to setup modprobe and kmod support. I just stopped after running "alsamixer" and it works perfectly afte that.