boot.b supplied with RedHat6.1 appears to be broken with respect to nfsroot clients booted from a floppy. After creating a nfsroot kernel with 2.2.12 and 2.2.14, I get the following errors using boot.b of RedHat 6.1 Looking up port of RPC 100003/2 on 192.168.4.1 portmap: server 192.168.4.1 not responding, timed out Root-NFS: Unable to get nfsd port number from server using default Looking up port of RPC 100005/1 on 192.168.4.1 portmap: server 192.168.4.1 not responding, timed out Root-NFS: Unable to get nfsd port number from server using default mount: server 192.168.4.1 not responding, timed out Root-NFS: Server returned error -5 while mounting /cluster/nfsnode VFS: Unable to mount root fs via NFS, trying floppy. Looking up port of RPC 100003/2 on 192.168.4.1 portmap: server 192.168.4.1 not reponding, timed out Root-NFS: Unable to get nfsd port number from server using default Looking up port of RPC 100005/1 on 192.168.4.1 portmap: server 192.168.4.1 not reponding, timed out Root-NFS: Unable to get nfsd port number from server using default mount: server 192.168.4.1 not responding, timed out Root-NFS: Server returned error -5 while mounting /cluster/nfsnode VFS: Unable to mount root fs via NFS, trying floppy. Switching boot.b for that of RedHat 6.0 results in clean nfsroot booting. We can't tie this error down to anything else except boot.b - we've been round the houses regards kernel options etc and had no problems with RedHat-6.0.
There were problems with LILO in older releases with passing long kernel append lines; these should be fixed in newer releases