Arch Linux

Proofrific

Member

Registered: 2008-01-05

Posts: 215

[Solved] Diskless Computer Lab, Clients Intermittently Hang on NFS

I'm setting up a computer lab with diskless clients based on https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Diskless_system.

The server uses dnsmasq for DHCP and TFTP, and they seem to be working fine. Each client has two network cards: one is a wired connection that connects to a switch that the server also connects to, and the other is a wireless card for internet access. On the wired connection, the server has a static IP address of 192.168.0.49 with a netmask of 255.255.255.0. Currently, I have two of the clients set up. NFS is used for network storage, and it seems buggy.

Sometimes when booting, a client will print the following during the netnfs4 hook and then hang:

:: running hook [netnfs4]
IP-Config: eth0 hardware address <deleted> mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
IP-Config: wlan0 hardware address <deleted> mtu 1500 DHCP RARP
IP-Config:  complete (from 192.168.0.49):
 address: 192.168.0.67     broadcast: 192.168.0.255     netmask: 255.255.255.0
 gateway: 192.168.0.49     dns0    : 0.0.0.0            dns1:   : 0.0.0.0
 rootserver: 192.18.0.49 rootpath:
 filename  : /srv/arch/boot/syslinux.efi

The hanging seems related to what the other client is doing. If I reboot the other client, the one that was hanging suddenly starts working fine.

Any ideas as to what's going on, or what information may provide clues? Thanks!

Last edited by Proofrific (2018-06-01 19:37:31)

Proofrific

Member

Registered: 2008-01-05

Posts: 215

Re: [Solved] Diskless Computer Lab, Clients Intermittently Hang on NFS

Changing the configuration file for PXELINUX from

ip=dhcp

to

ip=:::::eth0:dhcp

seems to make the booting reliable. I'm not sure why that would make a difference. Perhaps because each client has two network interfaces, eth0 and wlan0?

When there is a single client, it's fast. When there are two clients, however, they are terribly slow. Any ideas as to what may cause this?

Proofrific

Member

Registered: 2008-01-05

Posts: 215

Re: [Solved] Diskless Computer Lab, Clients Intermittently Hang on NFS

All the clients had the same hostname. Giving them different hostnames, per https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=237602, seemed to solve the problem. Marking as solved.

manio

Member

Registered: 2021-05-05

Posts: 11

Re: [Solved] Diskless Computer Lab, Clients Intermittently Hang on NFS

@Proofrific
After recent Arch upgrade my system stopped booting with PXE/nfsroot (nfs4 hook) with repeatedly displays the following error during boot:

SIOCGIFFLAGS: No such device

I turns out that the problem is the ipconfig invocation:

ipconfig ip=dhcp

Surprisingly the fix in 2026 was the same as yours in 2018, adding:

ip=:::::eth0:dhcp

to the kernel commandline and now it is working back again

btw: I also added this info to wiki page:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Diskless_system#NFS_2

WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 13,313

Website

Re: [Solved] Diskless Computer Lab, Clients Intermittently Hang on NFS

Mod note: closing this old topic.

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