Udpcast April 2004

udpcast@udpcast.linux.lu

4 participants
5 discussions

Getting info from ACPI - need to make kernel
by Donald Teed 02 May '04

02 May '04

During imaging, I am going to be grabbing information for our database such as BIOS service tag from Dell, MAC address, etc. I may be asked if I can also supply the battery pack serial number. I've noticed that I can get part of the battery info from under /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info . The 2.4.26 kernel linked on the udpcast website doesn't include ACPI support, so I'm trying to compile my own kernel. I've had limited success. I've done this sort of thing before, just not for a PXE boot environment. I need to be able to support the ipappend 1 option in default, and this requires the config option "IP: kernel level autoconfiguration" and DHCP/BOOTP under it. I'm not sure what network file system options must be provided. I don't really need to mount anything on NCP/NFS, etc, but just a normal PXE boot using initrd. I saw the sample config file for floppy based boot, but it was not close enough for what one needs in a PXE boot. --Donald Teed

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Timing problem with starting PXE boot and udp-sender
by Donald Teed 30 Apr '04

30 Apr '04

We have some less than reliable used laptops to image. Sometimes on a few machines the PXE boot starts and fails and it requires another boot up to get it going again. I mention this because the problem I mention was not observed before with more predictable machines. If 15 machines are booted, and set to go into receive mode, and udp-sender is run on the imaging server, and 4 clients need to be rebooted to restart PXE, we have noticed that we see a list of only the first 11 machines on the ready list from udp-sender, even after the remaining 4 have come up and show that UDP receiver is ready (but does not display "hit any key to start" on the remaining 4). It seems like there is a window of a few minutes before the udp-sender will stop listening for more udp-receivers to say they are ready. I checked the options and I don't see any that are designed to increase how long it will wait to see more machines responding as ready. Are there any suggestions? For now, I think we'll wait until all machines show udp-receiver ready and then run udp-sender, but I'd hope this will not be necessary. --Donald Teed

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udpcast, busybox diff
by emj＠chello.se 23 Apr '04

23 Apr '04

Hi Alain, and everyone else, thanks Alain for making this wonderfull tool. I really hope that you will have time for it in the future as well, it has amazed everbody I have showed it to since ~2002. Now I thought I was going to use the busybox dialog system you have built, So I downloaded this patch: http://udpcast.linux.lu/current/busybox.diff.gz and well I'm abit confused because I ran "patch -p0 <busybox.diff" and got the whole busybox distribution in a directory named busybox. I tried running this: # diff -Pur busybox-1.00-pre10 busybox |wc 38293 164676 1187667 # cat busybox.diff |wc 208529 900921 5876259 Have I missed something? I don't have alot of experience with diff, so maybe Iäm missing something here. Saludos Erik

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Trouble with tftpd and dhcp and broadcom ethernet client
by Donald Teed 20 Apr '04

20 Apr '04

The udpcast part is working well enough. I made a nice cast-o-matic image for PXE boot with all of the network devices we may need to support. I think cast-o-matic is the neatest think about udpcast and its tools. I'm using an initial menu in PXE boot to select how to launch udpcast (a solution suggested by Alain). For that process, DHCP client fires up and gets an address OK. The client is using a Broadcom BCM5702 based ethernet device. I select the menu item (say sender for whole disk) and then the linux kernel boots fine. DHCP gives out address 192.168.1.207 Now we get into the blue screen section and it shows: Sending bootp request... Alert info, udhcpc V0.9.9_pre) started debug, sending discover... (3 times) info, No lease, failing (OK) At the time the bootp request goes out the dhcp server shows this in the log file: in.tftpd[1902]: tftp: client does not accept options On the client, I use the OK button and see a prompt for Automatic Configuration. I select Yes for that, and I get another status screen showing that: info, udhcpc 0.9.9_pre started debug, Sending discover debug, sending select for 192.168.1.210 info, lease of 192.168.1.210 obtained lease time 2800 Again the daemon log for dhcpd and in.tftpd shows that "client does not accept options" However everything is fine on this second bootp pass. I read on Novell about the -r switch for in.tftpd to disable blksize for another Broadcom ethernet device in the same family. http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/nnlsmag/features/a_install_via_pxe_boot… So I've been using this to launch tftpd: in.tftpd -l -s /tftproot -vv -r blksize I'm avoiding inetd since it can stall when too many simultaneous requests come in (security feature, but no use to this situation). The -r blksize didn't change the problem. Once I manually click OK after the first bootp request and say Yes to automatically configuring with DHCP, it does work OK and udpcast works. However it would be better if the process could run without the user intervention at all of the clients. I know this isn't exactly a problem in udpcast itself, but in its surrounding environment, but I'm wondering if anyone might know if this is a problem specific to this client hardware and what might help the problem (other TFTP options to suspend, other kernel with newer driver that might avoid the issue)? There are only 2 machines on the network of my test, so there is no way another DHCP server might be answering the call. --Donald Teed

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Udpcast mailing list archives are working again
by Alain Knaff 17 Apr '04

17 Apr '04

Since end of January, list distribution and archiving on udpcast(a)udpcast.linux.lu was broken due to a mis-set alias. The problems are fixed now, and archives are working again. Archives can be browsed, as before, on http://udpcast.linux.lu/pipermail/udpcast/ Articles posted during the outage have been manually added, so that the archive is complete again. Have fun, Alain

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Udpcast April 2004