tinycore pxe, nfs, nbd

[rav1ne]

hello,

i'm playing with the pxe-boot feature. I've read the wiki, but that looks a bit outdated.
First i tried to boot with the latest syslinux/pxelinux, and i failed. With an older version, it was okay. tftp is works also.
My first tought was to put everything to an exported nfs. This works, but when booting TCL, it stucks at "Loading extensions" for minutes. Didn't know why, until i checked the scripts: it stuck at the "chown -R" and chmod parts. Dunno why it takes ages. Well i have a lot of files, so i splitted it. But still slow.
So i switched to nbd. The server is on debian wheezy. Cannot boot with it. Again, i've checked the scripts. Turned out nbd-client is in the busybox binary. Tried to connect from the console, with no luck. Tried with the "oldstyle", still no luck. I've read this in the nbd-server manual:

Also  note  that  even  if  this  parameter  is set to true, all exports will also be made  available  using  the  new  handshake protocol;  it is not possible to switch that off.

Which protocol is supported by busybox? I cannot find nbd utils in the repository.
Any idea?
thx
R.

[gerald_clark]

The wiki is current. on this topic.
I use it every day with an NFS tce directory.

[rav1ne]

Yes, nfs works, as i said. But on every boot, that "chown/chmod -R" slows everything down. My "optional" dir contains 850+ files, i made a small benchmark:

time chown tc:staff *

This takes 19 second over nfs. On localhost, it's 0.01 second. With 3500+ files, and chown/chmod, the boot process is over 3 minutes (approx). Yes, it's probably the nfs system not TCL, but i haven't found any solution, and nbd not working for me somehow.

R.

[gerald_clark]

Why are you running chown?
Where do you have 3500+ files, and why?

[rav1ne]

I'm not running it, TCL runs it at boot.
For example: /usr/bin/tce-setup "booting"
Maybe i'm mistaken, but that command runs over the whole tce directory. tce-config runs it for the home dir.

Why do i have lots of files? Those are softwares i built from sources and such...

[gerald_clark]

You shoud should not be putting stuff in the tce directory.  Put your custom files in /mnt/nfs, but leave them out of /mnt/nfs/tce.
The tce programs such as tce-load and apps, and backup will populate the tce directory appropriately.

[rav1ne]

Yeah, i'm gonna do that after all. I have to cleanup my optional dir somehow
thx

[gerald_clark]

You can use an 'opt=nfs' boot option if you want /opt persistent on /mnt/nfs.
If you do so, be sure to remove opt from /opt/.filetool.lst.
The same can be said for home.

[rav1ne]

Ok, thx.
Just for the record, i've compiled the nbd-client from source, and that worked. I even put that into an optional initrd, and mount is worked that way too. However it was fast, but has some limitation, so i'm gonna stay at nfs.