On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, A.J. Werkman wrote: > I am talking theory here but wouldn't it be possible to start of a > kickstart install without any floppy. > > If you have a NIC that supports network booting from the NIC, > shouldn't it be possible to setup a DHCP server to tell the NIC where > to 'tftp' a kernel image and the kernel, being given the appropriate > options, can boot and mount the nfs tree read ks.cfg and starts the > installation!!!! > > Or is daily practice not as nice as theory looks. I have a special box that does not have a floppy, so I had to figure out how to do this. As it turns out, it's fairly simple to do: First setup dhcpd and tftpd. Copy bootnet.img to your tftp root directory. NOTE: if you have a 3Com/Lanworks NIC, you may need to run bootnet.img through the "imggen" utility. eg: mv bootnet.img tmp.img imggen -a tmp.img bootnet.img Actually, I should point out this is the ONLY way I've tried it, since I have a Lanworks NIC card. I _THINK_ other NICs don't require the use of "imggen". Set the "filename" option in the dhcpd.conf file to bootnet.img. Do whatever it takes get your NIC card to send a DHCP/BOOTP request. For my NIC, I press CTRL-F2 as the box is booting. Once the DHCP/BOOTP server responds to the DHCP/BOOTP request, the bootnet.img file should be downloaded to the client (via TFTP). Next thing you should see is the syslinux prompt. I've even created a special initrd.img containing a ks.cfg file, so after pressing CTRL-F2, the rest of the installation is automatic. Now, here's the thing I'm trying to figure out.... Instead of using initrd as the installation root filesystem, I'd like to use an nfs root. I created a special kernel (on bootnet.img) that contains kernel support for NFS root. Then, I extract the contents of initrd.img to a directory on my NFS server, and set that directory as the "root-path" in the dhcpd.conf file. After the NIC sends the DHCP request, bootnet.img is downloaded, and the NFS root filesystem is mounted. The ks.cfg is detected, and the installation starts going. The problem comes when it tries to get the installation files from the network; either NFS, FTP or HTTP. I've tried them all and they all fail at the same point. I think the installation gets confused, because it thinks it needs to start the network, but the network is actually already up. I don't have the exact error message right now, but I believe it's when the installation tries to send it's own DHCP request (in order to bring up the network). If I remember correctly, there might be an NFS error as well. That tells me that perhaps the network is getting restarted and the NFS mount for the root filesystem is lost. What I'd like to be able to do, is set some kind of installation method where the install files (RedHat/base/*, RedHat/RPMS/*) are already available... ie, it doesn't need to use NFS, FTP, HTTP, CD-ROM, HD to get the files, because they're already there. In other words, my NFS root can just contain the entire RedHat tree, and the installation just needs to know where to find it. If anyone has any suggestions how to get this to work, please let me know.
