building a diskless workstation based around a 2.2.13 kernel (Mandrake) and having problems with NFS once the machine has booted from the /tftpboot/vmlinuz.xterm, run from the NFS-mounted root and come up with a mingetty logon.

So - I assume that your root is mounted ok, and you are now trying to mount the contents of fstab. Do any of the additional mounts (from fstab) work - or do they all fail ? I am a little confused that you say it fails after coming up with the logon prompt - does this mean that they were all originally mounted on startup and now failing ? Is there something in the startup process that is stopping or restarting the mountd/nfsd servers or something, after the Xterm has already mounted the disks ? I think you can turn on additional logging for mountd/nfsd if you run them in a console - so that you can debug things a little more (can't remember the details - sorry). Don't know if this helps or not, but when I was experimenting with diskless machines for our clustering project, I found the beowulf howto very useful. This had info on diskless machines, also a script that setup the diskless NFS root images on the server, using copies and symlinks (note: I had problems, as I setup my main servers partition and the NFS root images on separate partitions - so symlinks did not work - does not sound like you have this problem, but thought I would mention it !) This was for RH 5.2 (when I used it) - but was quite useful in seeing what you actually need to create. Don't know if this helps or not ;-) (I assume that you have seen the nfs-root mini howos, etc) ...

Kevin Taylors XDM document is good stuff Thank you ;-)

Kevin.