Sorry I missed the start of this...
I'm very near a solution for my Lab to do this very thing. It would
be working (I think :) except that I broke the custom kernel I want so
that one of the important NIC cards 'round here doesn't work.
The concept works (aslong as you have a 3com or eepro card and not a
tulip based card :)
It's a single floppy network install. The boot floppy is syslinux
based with the inportant network info in syslinux.cfg (it's a switched
multi subnet environment and I only want one sever not six)
The floppy kernel mounts root from an NFS server and then the
installer script (#!/bin/bash) is run from inittab.
The install.sh script does:
assign_host_variables # from ifconfig and DNS lookup
detect_drives # uses sfdisk
partition_drives # uses sfdisk
format_drives
mount_drives
base_install # cd $TARGET && tar -xzf $BASE_TGZ
mkfstab # with info saved from partition_drives
mkhosts
set_hostname
mkinterfaces # setsup /etc/network/interfaces
set_packages # chroot $TARGET dpkg-setpackages < $PKGS
do_lilo
#get_packages #moved to post install
ai_config # semi-random stuff mostly in /etc
# also setsup self erasin second stage
# installer /etc/rc2.d/S99install
I broke off the second stage install because, some of the packages had
trouble installing in the chrooted environment. It detects the NIC by
attempting to modprobe all the network device modules untill one works
then does:
apt-get -qq -y dselect-upgrade
apt-get clean
anXious
reset
apt-get -qq -y dselect-upgrade
The -y to apt-get is safe here as the configs are already inplace from
ai_config.
Gasp!
It's convoluted, a pain to set up initially, and unpackagable because
of all my site specific hacks and FAI may be in a place where it will
do this for me (it wasn't when I started, but alot of developments
gone on there and I haven't checked back), but damn it I'm *almost*
there :)
If anyone is up for some hacking I can go into more detail (off the
list I think?) but this is quite long winded enough for now.
A few months back there was talk on boot-flopies about this type of
functionality, but I decided I couldn't live with RH that long (7.0
had just come out), and I haven't checked the state since, so that's
another ray of hope.
On Thu, May 31, 2001 at 06:45:44PM -0700, Krzys Majewski wrote:
:with any luck, I can eventually brainwash my department to switch from
:redhat to debian. (Lots of problems with redhat, for the record. Not
:sure how much better debian would be, but at least debian truthfully
:advertises their releases as "unstable", rather than the ambiguous
:"7.1 (Seawolf)".)
Well, you see what lengths I'll go to to banish RH :)
-Jon
