>>>>> On Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:48:29 +0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Toomas Tamm) said:
> Dear mr. Lange, > I today had an experinece with FAI which appears not to be documented > on the net. You may post my e-mail to the web if you wish, or forward > to a mailing list, but please remove my e-mail addresses to reduce > spam. > I was struggiling with "Warning: unable to open an initial console" > during boot. Exactly the same symptoms as in > http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-fai@rrz.uni-koeln.de/msg03419.html > Just a reboot soon after mounting nfsroot. > The reason was quite different, however: > I had included the "udev" package into NFSROOT_PACKAGES in > /etc/fai/make-fai-nfsroot.conf because I had been struggling with udev > at a point furhter down the installation sequence. This was a "just in > case" change and I had even forgotten to create a new nfsroot, so it > had been sitting there for a while. Today I generated a new nfsroot > for unrelated reasons and suddenly FAI stopped working with the > symptoms described above. > After a lot of trial and error and with the help of subversion (always > keep your fai configuration under revision control! :-) ) I traced it > back to the nearly-empty /dev subdirectory which waits for the devfs > to be mounted... > Probably a workaround would have been to populate the /dev with > required nodes. I tried adding /dev/console and /dev/tty[0-9] but that > was apparently not sufficient. At this point I removed the udev > package from NFSROOT_PACKAGES, re-made the nfsroot, and things went > back to normal. > I hope this report, if published, will save some trouble and > frustration for someone in the future. > PS I used Debian 'stable' (sarge) on i386 throughout.