I spent a few minutes installing and configuring NFS, TFTP and NTP, which were fairly trivial. The take-home points from NFS were:

• Set the daemons to use static ports, so your firewall doesn’t suck.
• Check out the mountpoint option, which prevents exports if an arbitrary location isn’t mounted. This stops the “underlying” directory from being exported if the mount didn’t work.

Later on, I might look into setting up NTP multicast to reduce the network traffic, if I have time.

After that, I started looking into the DHCP and DNS setup. ISC DHCP wouldn’t be so bad, but BIND looks to be a real bear to configure. Fortunately, Stuart pointed me to dnsmasq, a DNS server that can also act as a DHCP server. In particular, the dhcp-boot option may suit for my PXE setup.

Thanks to iggy (Brian Jackson), a Gentoo dev, I was pointed to missing support for one of the disk controllers as one of the problems. Once I got that in, the master booted like a charm.

In the meanwhile, I discovered that newer versions of gpm fixed a problem that made a rescue attempt without /usr pretty much useless, because libgpm was in /usr and a ton of stuff linked against it via ncurses.

I also switched from raidtools to mdadm on claims that it’s newer, better supported and more consistent.

The LiveCD’s RAID and LVM autodetection seemed broken for me, because I had to do everything manually. Perhaps I’ll get a chance to look into that later.

After searching Gentoo’s Bugzilla, I found the problem with LVM starting before RAID. It’s already fixed, but not in the stable version of baselayout. Unstable package number one, here I come.

Still not sure about the nonpersistent error, but it would be nice if that resolved itself after the baselayout upgrade.