PXE booting the desktop image fails to configure network

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

Binary package hint: initramfs-tools

BOOTIF appears to not be set after going through today's iso image for maverick-desktop-i386 (20100706) and the accompanying pxelinux.0 file. This in turn causes DEVICE not to be set in casper, which causes the PXE-booted installation to fail to mount the NFS root and end.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Attaching casper.log with the boot started with the debug= parameter.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Attaching the contents of /proc/cmdline.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Attaching the contents of dmesg.

[Ameet Paranjape (ameetp)]

Mathieu,

What type of system is this?

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

I've been able to test this on two different Vostro V13, however, it seems to be the case on all the systems in the lab, so Toshibas, Dells, netbooks, etc.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

I'd like to sync up the relevant function in casper with live-initramfs in order to fix this, but on examination I found that the code in live-initramfs doesn't make sense - the relevant section of code is provably unreachable. I've filed a Debian bug about this.

[Ameet Paranjape (ameetp)]

This is blocking installs in the lab marking as critical.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Wrote a (quick) patch that seems to correct the issue. That said, it's making use of a function that is sourced from /init inside the initrd, and apparently not in casper itself, which seems far from optimal. Perhaps it would be a good idea to re-copy this function in casper-functions or casper-helpers instead.

Note also: apparently the IPAPPEND 2 option is now required for pxelinux to include BOOTIF in cmdline since casper doesn't just configure the interface specified in initramfs.conf.

[Robbie Williamson (robbiew)]

Lowering to "High" based on comment #8, i.e. installs in our lab are unblocked.

[Colin Watson (cjwatson)]

configure_networking is fine - it's in /scripts/functions which is sourced by /scripts/casper-functions which is sourced by /scripts/casper.

Thanks for your patch, which largely looks fine. I made a few more corrections - configure_networking calls ipconfig several times, and so /netboot.config was ending up with lots of duplicate stuff in it and things were breaking. A better approach seems to be to read the machine-readable file that ipconfig emits.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package casper - 1.241

---------------
casper (1.241) maverick; urgency=low

  [ Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre ]
  * Use configure_networking at do_netmount; it's at least more resilient
    than a simple ipconfig call since it retries, and it properly parses
    BOOTIF to know which devices to configure. (LP: #602273)

  [ Colin Watson ]
  * Parse the machine-readable file written out by ipconfig rather than
    trying to parse its human-readable output.
 -- Colin Watson <email address hidden> Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:37:56 +0100