Problem with iPXE and AoE

[mcb30]

(2012-09-18 14:15)Nestor Wrote:  

mcb30 Wrote:It looks as though your AoE target is simply not responding. You could try capturing a packet trace to see what's really happening.

I doubt this is the case, because when I booted from the client with the hard drive installed and used the commands aoe-stat and aoeping, they both produced the correct reply from the AoE device, as expected. Also, if I boot from a CD with the iPXE ISO, it loads the AoE device, otherwise GRUB would not even appear. Unless by "AoE target" you are referring to something else.

You could try capturing a packet trace to see what's really happening.

Quote:

mcb30 Wrote:iPXE does already have support for AoE. However, your loaded kernel+initrd also needs to have its own support for AoE, otherwise Linux won't be able to connect to the AoE target in order to mount the root filesystem.

Please define to what exactly you refer by "Loaded kernel+initrd", and also I would appreciate if you pointed me to the procedure, because I have been using the default unpatched undionly.kpxe file, under the assumption that it already had everything required to boot from an AoE device.

The default unpatched undionly.kpxe file is fine. iPXE already has AoE support; you don't need to do anything to the iPXE binary (which is undionly.kpxe).

However, the fact that iPXE is capable of booting from an AoE disk does not magically grant the same ability to the booted operating system (in your case Debian Squeeze). iPXE's AoE support is used to load the kernel and the initrd; after that, the loaded OS (Debian) takes over, and must establish its own connection to the AoE disk.

From a very quick search using terms such as "Debian AoE boot", it looks as though you may need to make some modifications to the base Debian install to make it AoE boot-capable.

Michael