[9fans] diskless boot of one terminal off kfs machine

[9fans] diskless boot of one terminal off kfs machine

[Steve Simon]

Hi,

I'am still struggling trying to get a (hard) disk-less terminal to boot
from a kfs standalone machine.

The kfs machine is savan and the diskless one is larch.

I have connected the two machines together via a crossover 10baseT cable
point to point.

I use savan (a laptop) all the time and the 3c589 works faultlessly.

I have hit several IRQ miseries on larch but I have got a combination that
works.
If I boot the install floppy on my diskless machine and do an explicit
ip/ipconfig I can ping the larchbox from savan.

I have added the MAC address to /lib/ndb/local on savan so DHCP can work.
I renamed the services in /rc/bin/service/_* to remove the _s

On savan then I run:
    aux/lisen il
    aux/listen tcp
    ip/dhcpd -d

I use the attached plan9.ini to boot larch into the 9pc.gz kernel.

it complains about not being able to find local/bzroot but continues - it
sees the
ethernet card OK. It prompts me for "root is from" th the bootargs (as
expected)
I accept this. Then I give my user name (same as on savan) and larch hangs.

After a few minuites it panics having given up trying to attach to the
fileserer.

netstat shows no open connections, the debug flag on dhcpd has caused no
output ether

What have i missed?

Also is it possible to boot from 9load rather than from 9pc.gz - this would
mean keeping
less state on larch's boot floppy.

-Steve

Re: [9fans] diskless boot of one terminal off kfs machine

[Conor Williams]

Steve
I compiled the 9pcdisk kernel for the diskless term not
the 9pc kernel - and loaded it onto my floppy.
my plan9.ini was something like:
ether0=type=ne2000 irq=15
auth=10.5.1.18
fs=10.5.1.19
bootargs=il -g 10.5.1.15 /net/ether0 10.5.1.20 255.255.255.0
the all the standard stuff...
dont used the dhcp or dns stuff yet till u get the above working

also on my auth server make sure that port 17008 is listening

l8r
will551
----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Simon" <steve.simon@ntlworld.com>
To: "9fans" <9fans@cse.psu.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, February 04, 2003 9:46 AM
Subject: [9fans] diskless boot of one terminal off kfs machine


> Hi,
>
> I'am still struggling trying to get a (hard) disk-less terminal to boot
> from a kfs standalone machine.
>
> The kfs machine is savan and the diskless one is larch.
>
> I have connected the two machines together via a crossover 10baseT cable
> point to point.
>
> I use savan (a laptop) all the time and the 3c589 works faultlessly.
>
> I have hit several IRQ miseries on larch but I have got a combination that
> works.
> If I boot the install floppy on my diskless machine and do an explicit
> ip/ipconfig I can ping the larchbox from savan.
>
> I have added the MAC address to /lib/ndb/local on savan so DHCP can work.
> I renamed the services in /rc/bin/service/_* to remove the _s
>
> On savan then I run:
>     aux/lisen il
>     aux/listen tcp
>     ip/dhcpd -d
>
> I use the attached plan9.ini to boot larch into the 9pc.gz kernel.
>
> it complains about not being able to find local/bzroot but continues - it
> sees the
> ethernet card OK. It prompts me for "root is from" th the bootargs (as
> expected)
> I accept this. Then I give my user name (same as on savan) and larch
hangs.
>
> After a few minuites it panics having given up trying to attach to the
> fileserer.
>
> netstat shows no open connections, the debug flag on dhcpd has caused no
> output ether
>
> What have i missed?
>
> Also is it possible to boot from 9load rather than from 9pc.gz - this
would
> mean keeping
> less state on larch's boot floppy.
>
> -Steve
>
>
>

Re: [9fans] diskless boot of one terminal off kfs machine

[David Presotto]

It sounds like you're booting a kernel but not finding the file
server (or auth server).  Bootp/dhcp (or your plan9.ini) must be
telling you a file server since you're not being prompted for one.

1) does 'netstat -n' on savan show anything listening on 17008?  If not,
  the kfs there isn't listening for network calls.  It doesn't do it by
  default, you have to ask it to.  Do 'disk/kfscmd listen' and then do
  a 'netstat -n'.  man kfscmd

2) are you pointing to the right file server?  What does the /lib/ndb
  entry look like for larch?

3) are you running an auth server on savan?

Also to get the savan to be a boot server, you need to run 'ip/tftpd' in
addition to the ip/dhcpd.

If you still have problems, send me copies of the /lib/ndb files, savan's
/bin/termrc, the plan9.ini on larch, and the output of a 'netstat -n'.

Re: [9fans] diskless boot of one terminal off kfs machine

[Russ Cox]

You didn't attach a plan9.ini, so it's hard to tell exactly,
but it sounds like either you still have some old pieces of
the install plan9.ini or you're booting an install kernel
rather than 9pc.gz.  Look in plan9.ini and remove any references
to local!/bzroot.  If there are still messages about local!/bzroot,
you're booting the wrong kernel.

Russ

Re: [9fans] diskless boot of one terminal off kfs machine

[Steve Simon]

Thanks to all for your kind help.

My problems turned out to be towfold.

As I was just using a crossover cable between two ethernet cards
the auto media detection on the cards somtimes fails. This is easy to
fix, I just added a media=10BaseT clause to the ether0=tyle=xxx lines
in plan9.ini on both machines.

Seccondly I was using the using aux/listen to start il17031 rather than
starting
disk/kfscmd listen (Doh !)

I started to build a fossil server but gave up in the end. The transfer
rate seemed very slow over ethernet (30% utilisation from looking at stats),
I haven't investigated.

If any of the fossil developers is interested I was using an fs interleaved
filesystem accross 3 fairly fast disks and got "disk: io=10021 at 8.779ms"
I got about 25 of these in 3 hours of mkfs | mkext before giving up.
The times increased slowly about 13ms but the counts stayed at 10010 +- 10.

-Steve

Re: [9fans] diskless boot of one terminal off kfs machine

[Steve Simon]

Thanks to all for your kind help.

My problems turned out to be towfold.

As I was just using a crossover cable between two ethernet cards
the auto media detection on the cards somtimes fails. This is easy to
fix, I just added a media=10BaseT clause to the ether0=tyle=xxx lines
in plan9.ini on both machines.

Seccondly I was using the using aux/listen to start il17031 rather than
starting
disk/kfscmd listen (Doh !)

I started to build a fossil server but gave up in the end. The transfer
rate seemed very slow over ethernet (30% utilisation from looking at stats),
I haven't investigated.

If any of the fossil developers is interested I was using an fs interleaved
filesystem accross 3 fairly fast disks and got "disk: io=10021 at 8.779ms"
I got about 25 of these in 3 hours of mkfs | mkext before giving up.
The times increased slowly about 13ms but the counts stayed at 10010 +- 10.

-Steve

Re: [9fans] diskless boot of one terminal off kfs machine

[Russ Cox]

> If any of the fossil developers is interested I was using an fs interleaved
> filesystem accross 3 fairly fast disks and got "disk: io=10021 at 8.779ms"
> I got about 25 of these in 3 hours of mkfs | mkext before giving up.
> The times increased slowly about 13ms but the counts stayed at 10010 +- 10.

I think those are normal.  Do you have DMA turned on?
cat /dev/sdC0/ctl and make sure that the dmactl number
is not zero.

Russ