[SOLVED] No /usr/pluto/diskless

[wierdbeard65]

Hi,

I'm trying to get my first system to play ball.

I have installed 810 and cabled up a machine to be my MD. When I try to boot it, I ket a kernel panic, so I've followed the instructions on the unrecognised NIC Wiki as well as this thread:
http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=8527.0
What I have discovered is that I don't seem to have a /usr/pluto/diskless directory on my core. Has this been moved? I'm suspecting that this is preventing the correct mounts from happening and thus causing the panic.

Anyone got any pointers?

[pigdog]

Hi,

/usr/pluto/diskless is still there.

You probably didn't get to "we announced ourselves to the router" message so no device number XX (i.e. 35, etc) was created.

Your kernel panic is happening on initial boot up.

Do you know what your NIC is?

Can you boot Kubuntu or Ubuntu or Fedora Live CD or something from DVD or USB key and run a lspci -vv -nn command?

Cheers.

[wierdbeard65]

Thanks for the response, pigdog! The directory was most definately not there though....

Anyway, bit of an odd one this!

It turned out that the problem was with my switch. Spanning Tree was stopping the NIC from communicating in the crucial DHCP interval and this was preventing the diskless boot from completing properly.

Once I turned it off (PortFast or whatever) the system booted fine.

The /usr/pluto/diskless directory was then created by the script that also created the MD's sub-directory. So it would seem that it isn't there until you create your first MD (i.e. it isn't created by the installation system).

Anyway, I'm now a step further on! Thanks to everyone who had a look at this.

[pigdog]

Hi,

Yes, the diskless directory is created when first MD is generated.  It doesn't exist until then.

Sorry that I didn't correctly explain that.

Cheers.