diskless stations and 7-current

Hello All!


I've been testing diskless stations. The server runs 7-current i386
(built at 2006-12-11). PXE loads pxeboot, then the GENERIC kernel is
loaded via NFS. / and /usr are NFS mounted from the server. /home
is NFS mounted from a workstation.

Here are some results.

1. The bootpd daemon sometimes do the work, sometimes -- not. It is loaded
   via inetd but stays loaded forever (according to bootpd(8) the default
   value is 15 minutes).

   I didn't find out when/why it fails. One morning (the daemon survived
   the whole night) I killed it and the next booting was a success.
   Then it failed again.

   net/isc-dhcp3-server works here just fine.

2. While booting, the diskless station logs a note that
   /var/db/mountdtab cannot be created. After /conf/default/var/db
   directory is created those messages dissapears.

3. Diskless stations hang forever when "shutdown -p" at
   "saving entropy". Halt and reboot work as expected.

4. If gdm is started at the diskless station there is no chance to
   switch to any console, <C-A-Fn> doesn't work.

5. GDM seems to be build by default with IPv6 support and listens
   only at udp6 *.xdmcp. Rebuilding without IPv6 helps to get it
   listen at udp4.

Other then that works just fine.
Thanks for all folks doing the hard work!


WBR
-- 
Boris Samorodov (bsam)
Research Engineer, http://www.ipt.ru Telephone & Internet SP
FreeBSD committer, http://www.FreeBSD.org The Power To Serve