Diskless MD

[colinjones]

Got it, will keep that in mind for the next one I try, thanks!

Totallymaxed: can't comment on whether the display drivers were working correctly (no way to tell really!), all I can say is that the exact same laptop, with the exact same PXE configuration stuck in a reboot loop before I tried to add the MD to the Admin console - (1audio: I note that it was well into Linux boot, having already done several pages of logging on the screen, including changing the font, so there is no indication of a PXE issue, it gets well past the PXE part).

As soon as I created the MD manually (as a device, directly, not using the specific Add MD function, as that didn't work as already described) and rebooted the laptop again, it worked perfectly.

Nothing to fix here for me, I was only testing using it, I am not attempting to get it working permanently, and have now moved on to testing other stuff - just thought it might be of use to someone else.

ok just a footnote to this then - adding the device manually in our experience can often leave you with an MD that looks like its been created fully and is working ok but in fact often is not. It seems like some of the scripts that get run during and after auto-detection do not complete properly if a manual add device is carried out. I can't say what exactly fails in this situation but it is our experience that using auto-detection is the most reliable way to add MD's in particular.

However your mileage may vary ;-)

[RGoolsby]

The hybrid/core boots fine. 

I get the error when I try to boot the MD.

[RGoolsby]

ipconfig: No Devices to configure
/init: 1:Cant Open /tmp/net-eth0.conf

Kernal Panic - Not Syncing:  Attempted to Kill Init

No one has seen this error before?  or have any suggestions on how to do it?



I am currently using a gateway laptop as the MD, nothing about the laptop should matter correct?  Except for the fact it needs to PXE boot?

[dopey]

I have seen this... in fact one of my dell laptops I'm going to turn into a Kitchen MD is doing this. I haven't had the time to research it much, but I'm relatively sure it has to do the the kernel version that is being loaded. For one reason or another ipconfig can find any network devices. This probably means that the version of the kernel either doesn't have proper support for the NIC or Motherboard.

I should note that I have run linux on that laptop before... though I admittedly haven't used it in about 2 years or so...

[RGoolsby]

Ok that makes sense.  I will check the compatibility of mobo / NIC.. but I have a feeling it should be fine bc I have run several distros in the past...but never hurt to double check

[dopey]

One thing I forgot to mention: I did notice that the network driver does get loaded. Since this is an older laptop, however, I'm thinking it might have something to do with acpi and the M/B compatibility. I have had issues with other integrated network interfaces when the M/B has a buggy acpi implementation. When I disabled acpi on the kernel command line everything worked.

Of course, I'm just grasping at straws at this point. I've finally got some time off from work, so I'll resume my testing either today or tomorrow (I have a lot of things I need to test).

[dopey]

Ok, I just tried again. I ended up running the update prior to this, so I'm sure that helped. After running the update I clicked on rebuild image for the media director and then booted the thing up... It worked!

If you are still having difficulty try running the update and see if that helps.

Edit:
Scratch that... I got two issues with two different MD's mixed up. Although the update did fix one of the completely unrelated issues, this one remains. I'll see if I can look into it further tomorrow...

[dopey]

Ok, I got it to boot!
It was acpi as I suspected, but it ws the other way around. ACPI is disabled by default and I needed to re-enable it to get it to boot. This can be done by editing /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default. I just removed the part that says acpi=off.

[RGoolsby]

Ok thanks, I will give this a try this evening.  I am assuming that this file is on the core?

[dopey]

Yep, it's on the core. Also I assumed that you haven't actually created the MD device yet. If you have then you need to edit the file with the same name as the MAC address for that MD instead of default.