nfs send error 65

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:

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:

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.