lucid won't boot from nfs because of mountall.conf

Binary package hint: mountall

Description: Ubuntu lucid (development branch)
Release: 10.04
Package: 2.8

I had prepared a lucid root-image to be mounted via NFS, using PXE to deliver the kernel, initrd, and boot parameters. This has worked previously with hardy without any problems. But, apparently the new upstart boot scheme has thrown a wrench into the works. The system wouldn't boot past mountall. I received no intelligible error messages, not even with the kernel parameter debug or 'init=/sbin/init --debug'. The last message was always: "mountall: Can't connect to plymouth." Whether plymouth was installed or not was immaterial.

After two days of banging my head against the wall, and getting a fresh perspective from a fellow admin, I finally found a workaround: Adding 'mountall' before 'exec mountall ...' in /etc/init/mountall.conf allowed the system to boot to completion. All mounts are correct.

We discovered this by starting a shell directly before the 'exec mountall ...' using the command '/bin/sh' and looking around, trying different things, and by chance the system booted when we had typed mountall to check its behavior interactively.

I hope the workaround helps others, and the report helps the developers find the bug.