[TriLUG] PXE booting into a minimal linux environment

[Shawn Hood]

After I wrote the post, I realized that I explained myself poorly.
Initrd was loading fine.  I ended up needing to put some NIC drivers
in initrd, tweak some nfs stuff, and get udev to run earlier than it
was by default.

Thanks to Brian Jones and Jason Faulker on #trilug today, however.
They helped me make some sense of the problem.

Shawn

On 10/18/06, Robert Dale <robdale at gmail.com> wrote:
> Shawn,
>
> It sounds like you're missing something, like the root image (or
> initrd).  This is what will set up the environment for NFS mounting.
> PXE booting is pretty generic - standardized - in that it's not
> specific to any distribution.  These instructions seem to have more
> information than what you were looking at -
> http://www.stanford.edu/~alfw/PXE-Kickstart/PXE-Kickstart.html
>
> Also, make sure your initrd contains the right drivers for you NIC and
> other boot-time critical components.
>
> --
> Robert Dale
>
> On 10/18/06, Shawn Hood <shawnlhood at gmail.com> wrote:
> > List,
> >
> > I would like to boot a knoppix cd image or other minimal linux via my
> > PXE server which utilizes PXELinux.  While there are a number of faqs,
> > wikis, etc. out there on doing this with Knoppix, most of them are
> > describing how to start a pxe server from Knoppix, then starting a
> > terminal server.  I want to boot knoppix via my pxe server (rhel4u4
> > box).
> >
> > That said, I know it is not feasible to somehow load the entire disk
> > image via PXE.  Is there a way to load the Knoppix initrd/kernel via
> > PXE, and send boot parameters to set an IP and mount an NFS share?  I
> > saw this on http://dev.brantleyonline.com/wiki/index.php/PXE_Booting_-_Knoppix
> > but have experienced some problems.  I used the "knoppix
> > nfsdir=10.0.0.101:/path" parameter but it's not working.  The network
> > interfaces aren't even being configured, so how is it supposed to
> > work?  After the client boots the image I have stored on my PXE
> > server, it cannot mount the NFS share (thus the knoppix fs isn't
> > available) and exits to a minimal shell.
> >
> > To compound this, my keyboard isn't working in this minimal shell even
> > after trying a number of boot parameters.  I'll probably get this
> > worked out.
> >
> > I've considered booting to PXEGrub and working from there, but this
> > seems like an unnecessary intermediate step.
> >
> > Any ideas?
> >
> >
> > Thanks
> >
> > Shawn
> > --
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> >
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-- 
Shawn Hood
(910) 670-1819 Mobile