Asus P5N7A-VM Diskless MD won't boot

[murcel]

Dear all,

i got a core with some MDs up and running since maybe a year. the current version is 7.10 (the most current).
The core has a R8168, where i had to modify the r8169, to prevent loading.
this is running fine.

Now i got a new board (ASUS P5N7A-VM), and if i look at the features, very neat.
From what i read in the wiki it uses the RTL8168 Lan COntroller, from what i read on the web, its using a RTL8211CL Chipset.
Overall it has a MCP7A Nvidia Chipset.

so i tried to boot up this system through PXE. But at the end following message:

***********************************************
[   11.196000] NET: Registered protocol family 17
ipconfig: eth0: SIOCGIFINDEX: No such device
ipconfig: no devices to configure
/init: .: 1: Can't open /tmp/net-eth0.conf
[   11.204000] Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

************************************************

so i went through:

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/R8168#Asus_M3A78-EM
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Unrecognized_NIC
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/ASUS_eee_box_b202_setup

i followed every single step in those wiki pages. all went fine, without any troubles. But after booting the same error message as stated above.

after that i tried to install the ubuntu 8.10 on the MD.
insatllation went fine, expect netwroking. it installed a WIFI Adapter (running fine) and a second controller (NVIDIA Ethernet Controller), which has a NO LINK indication.
after stumbling around, i found out that it using the forcedeth driver.
some hints in the web, using options forecedeth msi=0 and msix=0 dind't brang any help.
then i tried the ethtool and set the speed to 100 and duplex to half and .... BANG .... the internet connection worked.

1. So now, the big big question, how can i setup forcedeth with fixed speed to be used under 7.10 diskless media director?!

2. on the web, i saw, that someone can use the ethtool in a script, which is performed at the start, but how to do it in the boot image for the diskless one?!

Any help? Thanks

[donpaul]

The boot images are under /usr/pluto/diskless. So if your md device is 33, chroot to /usr/pluto/diskless/33.

[murcel]

thanks donpaul.
thats clear so far, but do you have any idea on how to do it exactly?
e.g. if i have the script duplexoff.sh, wehre do i have to put it and how to call it, so that it is executed before the error message above appears...

sorry for asking so stupid, but i didn't dig into linux so deep so far. just following tutorials and learned some things...

thanks for your help

[murcel]

waht i found out is, that one solution can be to add

iface eth0 inet static
pre-up /usr/sbin/ethtool -s $IFACE 10 duplex half
address ...

to the /etc/networking/interfaces.

but how to do it on PXE?

[murcel]

Just an update.
with the current 8.10 release and the newest alpha installer, this issue seems to be fixed.

[Marie.O]

murcel,

thanks for the positive feedback.