sysinstall flakey after PXE booting 5.3 / AMD64

[allan]

Hello,

This message is directed toward PXE masochists.  I'm heading straight to
the gory details.

I loopback mounted 5.3-RELEASE-amd64-bootonly.iso and copied the entire
boot directory onto my OpenBSD DHCP server.  I tweaked this by adding the
directive boot_askname= to loader.conf.  Then I PXE booted by Tyan S2882
to that weird askname loader prompt where it asks for a boot device.  I
entered by hand ufs:/dev/md0 and bingo I had sysinstall running.

Under sysinstall I was able to run fdisk and disklabel successfully,
configure bge0 via DHCP, and select ftp4.freebsd.org as my FTP server. I
watched network traffic on the OpenBSD firewall and I see my server
exchanging TCP/IP packets with freebsd.isc.org (an alias for ftp4).

Then sysinstall complains that it can't talk to my FTP server and returns
me to the screen to select a new FTP server.  I select any server and then
it asks me if I want to skip network config.  No matter which path I
choose, on the second pass it gets even more sick than the first pass.  I
end up answering no to about 50 dialogs before it returns me to a
sysinstall menu screen.  On the DEBUG console I see evidence that bge0 was
switched to down status when I started the second attempt to connect to
an FTP server, despite skipping (or not skipping) network reconfig.

I wasn't able to discover much in the holographic console.  That console
has rm but not ls.  It has ifconfig but not netstat.  I can cd into /stand
but hardly any other directory listed in the PATH variable.  Next time
I'll try typing xyzzy to see if more commands materialize.

What seems clear is that sysinstall starts sick and becomes sicker.  I've
repeated this drill several times with consistently depressing results.

Where I'm at now is wondering if I should give up, dig the server out of
the network closet, and hang a CDROM off the side (hangs head in shame). 
Is sysinstall not yet quite up to the job, or have I missed a few specs of
magic pixie dust in my loader.conf configuration?

Allan

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Re: sysinstall flakey after PXE booting 5.3 / AMD64

[Erik Norgaard]

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I wasn't able to discover much in the holographic console.  That console
has rm but not ls.  It has ifconfig but not netstat.  I can cd into /stand
but hardly any other directory listed in the PATH variable.  Next time
I'll try typing xyzzy to see if more commands materialize.
What seems clear is that sysinstall starts sick and becomes sicker.  I've
repeated this drill several times with consistently depressing results.
Where I'm at now is wondering if I should give up, dig the server out of
the network closet, and hang a CDROM off the side (hangs head in shame). 
Is sysinstall not yet quite up to the job, or have I missed a few specs of
magic pixie dust in my loader.conf configuration?
I have been messing with pxeboot lately on i386 though. I don't know 
what's on the bootonly iso, but usually there is a memory file system 
that is mounted as root containing the binaries. OpenBSD (AFAIK) does 
not support (FBSD) memory disks, so if you want to pook around you 
better fire up a FBSD.

Some tricks I have learned along the way: It's neat to have init with 
your memory disk image also. You can toggle wether init or sysinstall is 
started setting init_path in loader.conf. If /etc/rc is not present for 
init you will be offered to start a shell, then you can manually try and 
debug the system if hardware is causing trouble.

The best documentation for sysinstall is ... the source ... many 
variables are not documented, I found some of the variables from the 
configuration menu by grepping for the menu items in the source.

sysinstall can read an installation script if it's called install.cfg 
and is in / or /stand. It should(?) be posible to set any variable set 
in the interactive menu.

The PATH environment variable appears to be hardcoded (install.c):
  setenv(PATH, /bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/stand:
/mnt2/stand:/mnt2/bin:/mnt2/sbin:/mnt2/usr/bin:/mnt2/usr/sbin, 1);
But, I must admit that sysinstall would not find ifconfig if not in the 
same directory as sysinstall itself.

Well, if you need to get work done now, it is probably faster just to 
install from CD as usual, but pxeboot is too cool to give up just 
because sysinstall is causing troubles :-)

BTW, I have messed arround so much that I eventually decided to 
docuement my yet unsuccesfull attempts to install (at least so I can 
repeat the process to the same state of lack of success :-).

I don't know if my document is any better than the others you can find 
on the net: www.daemonsecurity.com/pxe/

Cheers, Erik
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