Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 435697
No swap in diskless environment
Last modified: 2010-04-06 07:21:25 EDT
Description of problem: I am trying to configure swap for diskless workstations using the local HDD by modifying /etc/fstab to contain something like: /dev/sda swap swap defaults 0 0 but it does not work - the swap is not activated during the boot procedure. Later manual activation by swapon -a command works fine. Further investigation shows that the problem cause is the fact, that the block device /dev/sda is not known to the system at the time /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit script is being executed. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: always Steps to Reproduce: 1. install a HDD into the machine booting via network 2. modify /etc/fstab to contain local swap partition on that hdd. 3. boot Actual results: no swap is activated Expected results: swap is activated as per configuration in /etc/fstab Additional info:
It turned out, that the hardware initialization is too early followed by the attempt to active the swap so that the necessary block device in /dev is not yet created. The simple workaround to this problem is adding some small delay (sleep 5 in my case seems to be sufficient) to the /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit startup script before activating the swap. Ondrej
System-config-netboot is now in maintenance mode only, no further development is planned for RHEL 4.x. Closing as WONTFIX. I'm not sure about exact sleep time before swap activation.