Johann Klammer wrote: > lrhorer wrote: >> I have PXE booting working from my Debian "Squeeze" server, and I can > What software package are you using? pxelinux?
Yes. >> launch the Debian Network installer on a machine supporting PXE. I >> can;t quite figure out how to create a boot image from a connfigured >> Linux workstation, though. IOW, I have a workstation with a hard >> disk installed that has Debian configured and working the way I want, >> with >> all the right utilities and device drivers. How can I take that >> system and create an image that will boot on diskless workstations >> running PXE? If it matters, the workstation is using GRUB to boot >> Linux. I don;t require this to be the case for the diskless clients, >> but I don't mind, either, as long as everything loads properly. > If you mean that you want to transfer _the_whole_ file system when > booting. Yeah, that was the idea. I got the system to be under 100M, uncompressed, and under 40M, compressed. > You could try to use the initial ram file system for doing this, > but you will need a _lot_ of ram for this and it may take a while for > large images. > > A slightly saner approach would be mounting the root filesystem via > NFS. The issue there is the system will fail if the link to the NFS server fails. It's going to be a wireless link, and prone to failure. The advantage of a network image boot is once the initrd is loaded, the PXE system won't need the tftp server any longer. > Setting this up requires on the server: > A kernel, an initial ramdisk image(+NFS client), a pxe boot > image(syslinux's pxelinux works alright) which loads the kernel, a > tftp server for transferring the kernel image, a dhcp server for > setting up IP addresses, an NFS server to export the client's file > system... possibly more? Yeah, I looked at this solution, but abandoned it because of the inherent problems. > On the client(workstation): > A pxe compliant network card that is not too old, There's no network card. This is an IOMEGA file server. It has two built-in 1000M interfaces. > WARNING: > There are HOWTOs around which advise you to flash your card's BIOS > using a custom variant. This is not necessary for pxelinux. > > Read the documentation for initramfs-tools and syslinux. I got the system put together, and partially booting, but at some point it would lock up. I'm not sure why. I finally gave up on the network boot idea. Instead, I simply did a netboot of the Debian installer - which is trivial - and loaded the OS on a USB Thumb Drive. The USB drive will just have to remain attached to the system full time. I implemented a number of procedures to limit the number of writes to the flash drive, so hopefully the flash drive won't have to be replaced any time soon. Thanks, though. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/knudnq1lv83uz0btnz2dnuvz5tmdn...@giganews.com
