root nfs problem

[Shawn Barnhart <swb@mercury.campbell-mithun.com>]

Not sure if this is the right place, but I'm not quite sure what to do next
and thought some of you might be able to give me some kind of clue as to
what's wrong with my root nfs setup.  Both systems are 486 Linux systems,
with the server running 2.0.33 and the client 2.0.33 as well (RHL 4.1 +
updates).  (have also tried 2.0.32).  nfs-server 2.2beta16 and 

1) built nfs-root enabled kernel, with 2.0.32 and 2.0.33 versions.

2) exported base filesystem (/client/) to client rw,no_root_squash
(consists of /bin /dev /sbin /lib /proc (empty, just mount point) /etc /tmp
/var, with all symlinks rebuilt to be relative to client directories and my
/etc files have been edited 

3) booted client with all IP parameters specified (ie, not using tftp or
bootp).

Client system boots, loads kernel, connects to NFS server and then does
nothing after "VFS mounted root (nfs filesystem)."  At least it does
nothing in terms of screen output.  The server shows significant
activity for rpc.nfsd during this period of time, tcpdump shows nfs
traffic between client & server, but no client console output at all, even
when left run for hours.

I've run rpc.nfsd in debug mode and captured the output, and the only
file it seems to access is /client/dev/tty1.  Never init or anything else
that would indicate that the system was starting up.

I'm not sure what's going wrong here -- I've actually gone so far as to
install linux on the machine I'm using as a client and nfs-mount all the
client directories over its local directories without any problems --
binaries run, init runs, writes to /dev/tty1 give me output on the console,
and so on.

Is there anyplace else I can look for problems?   Short of trying 2.1.xx
kernels or much older kernels, I'm kind of at a loss here.  I don't know
what else to look at for debug info since the booting client doesn't say
anything.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.  I'm just about to
think there's something else that needs to be done.


-- 
Shawn Barnhart
swb@mercury.campbell-mithun.com
I live like I type:  fast, with a lot of mistakes.
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