[Beowulf] Timeout on eth0 when booting disk less

[John Hanks]

Do you have "spanning-tree portfast" enabled on your switch ports? The
syntax will depend on switch vendor, but the principal is the same. When
the nic comes up there can be a significant delay while STP decides whether
to pass packets or not, which can wreak havoc on things that expect the
network to Just Work(tm). portfast tells the switch to assume a client, not
another switch is on the port.

jbh

On Sun, Mar 12, 2017 at 1:02 PM Jon Tegner <tegner at renget.se> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm booting some nodes disk less, using root file system on NFS. The
> first phase (PXE, tftp etc) works without problems. The second phase,
> when the system is actually supposed to boot over NFS the machine hangs
> about every second time - and it seems to be a result of the relevant
> nic (eth0) not negotiating its properties before some kind of timeout
> kicks in. Obviously resulting in a failure to boot the NFS file system.
> If I reboot the node it eventually works.
>
> This could possibly be a problem with the switch, but one remedy would
> seem to be to extend the time before the timeout kicks in (it seems to
> be a few seconds at the moment). Any hints on how to achieve this?
>
> Thanks,
>
> /jon
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