Greetings
I am about to repeat history. I began a thread on 3/15/2013 reporting
and fixing a bunch of issues, one issue being loss of video upon the
client building a new target host. Since I lost the fix detail in
March, I'm back in December to carefully document the fix this time around.
Here is what I've done: A few days ago I purged all vestiges of fai
from my workstation named tango and installed a fresh 4.0.8 version from
fai project wheezy repository. Tango host OS is Ubuntu 12.04LTS with
all updates. I followed FAI Guide section 4.3 using SaltStack to load
and configure fai server thus I have good record of configuration. My
last step was to
...# fai-chboot -IFv -u nfs://192.168.1.12/srv/fai/config demohost
and then initiate a build on the same Target hardware as used in March.
While watching the console on the target host, all progresses fine for
1:12 min after power-up when the display goes black. Prior to failure,
PXE has successfully loaded vmlinuz and turned control over to the new
kernel. The failure follows the Init 2.88 message. Perhaps 5sec later
the monitor power led turns from green to yellow proving the interface
has shut down. For a few more minutes the eth0 and hard drive remain
busy and finally go idle themselves.
In March, Toomas Tamm believed the video interface hardware in my
particular host is a strange variety, and it seems correct to me. The
bad news is that his suggestion does not work today, and modprobe has
such a large list I doubt I will be able to sort it out. The black
screen in March was solved by something unknown to me at this moment.
If no driver is the problem, I am most puzzled about why the interface
is shut down upon failure to find suitable driving software. Why does
linux not return to whatever worked OK a few seconds earlier even though
it is not the ideal solution?
The build on the target by fai client did not finish, but much happened
correctly. I have copies of error.log and dmsg.log to go over in the
next couple days searching for things to fix. Actually I have been more
successful than in March and with less pain getting to this stage
following my purge and restart. The best news is that the black screen
is today's nuisance failure, because a ssh session works fine.
Can anyone add anything to the loss of console failure?
Cheers
Geo
