[openib-general] Port of ISC DHCP-3.0.2 to OpenIB IPoIB

[Josh England]

Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 08:17:43PM -0700, Josh England wrote:
> 
>>Troy Benjegerdes wrote:
>>
>>>On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 06:06:30PM -0500, Hal Rosenstock wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>>On Wed, 2005-03-30 at 20:04, Josh England wrote: 
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Are there any plans to modify the linux DHCP client so it would be
>>>>>possible to do kernel-level DHCP and NFSroot over IB?
>>>>
>>>>I took a quick look at this and it looks pretty straightforward. Stay
>>>>tuned...
>>>
>>>
>>>I'd say don't.
>>>
>>>Using initrd/initramfs is a much better solution. At some point the
>>>in-kernel dhcp is going to get so buggy and old it's going to get
>>>removed.
>>
>>I know...it's just crummy to have ship another 1.3 Megs out to every node.
>>
>>
>>>I boot all my cluster systems with NFS root servers, and I'm trying to
>>>get everything moved to using Debian packaged kernels with initrd's.
>>>With an initrd, you at least have a chance to get a shell and figure out
>>>why you couldn't find your nfs server, instead of "kernel panic, I'm
>>>going to die now" you get with in-kernel dhcp/nfs.
>>
>>Check out oneSIS (http://onesis.org).  It can build initrds for you that
>>do NFSroot (and drop to a shell when things go sour).  I'd love to hear
>>some feedback from people familiar with running NFSroot.
> 
> 
> Debian has a package called "lessdisks" that does some similiar stuff..
> If I do "apt-get install initrd-netboot-tools", and then install a
> debian kernel image, it builds an initrd that can netboot. I suppose my
> next trick after I get the debian kernel maintainers to make sure
> infiniband is enabled is to try booting over IPoIB.
> 
> What dhcp client does onesis use? The debian lessdisks stuff uses
> 'udhcpc', advertised as a "very small DHCP client".

It has used udhcpc in the past, but I noticed it going significantly
slower on some machines and never found out why.  Right now it uses
dhclient, but that is easy enough to change.  The initrd itself is a
full mini-linux (busybox) with some helpful utilities (though I still
need to add lspci).  Maybe this discussion could be taken off the openib
list, though.  I'd love to talk more about the other cool stuff that
oneSIS can do.

-JE