Proceeding with my Christmas presents, I have refactored my ${HOME} lab. One of the goals was to migrate my public gateway to a diskless Soekris Net6501 my beloved wife offered me :)
The overall PXE/NFS process is explained a billion times over the Internet, only particular point here is that I used dnsmasq instead of ISC DHCP.
Nevertheless I came across an issue that took me way too long to understand; while the boot process seemed perfectly fine, at some point, after Setting up ttys, init hung and the kernel showed the following message:
nfs send error 65 for 1.2.3.4:/foo/bar/root
Looking at /var/run/rc.log I saw that the last rc script called was /etc/rc.d/pf_boot, which tries to read /etc/pf.boot.conf if it exists and then enables pf, therefore blocking all traffic. So that was only a firewalling issue. I created the /etc/pf.boot.conf file with the following content:
pass in log all keep state pass out log all keep state
which will be surcharged later by the real pf rules on the gateway.
Once done, init proceeded, and my new diskless / fanless NetBSD gateway was up and running.
Update
I’ve unplugged that crappy net6501. Turns out Soekris provides 4 GBe NICs with a CPU which is unable to handle one single Gbps, not to talk about OpenVPN encrypted tunnels.
I kept the same NFS setup, but plugged a basic Core 2 Duo Intel CPU and a couple of GBe NICs to it, and they do the job perfectly.
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