On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, R P Herrold wrote: > On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, John wrote: > > On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Jim Wildman wrote: > > > > 3) Configure PXE boot so if the box is rebooted and a particular link is > > > in place it reinstalls, else boot from the local drive. > > > > This has possibilities, but needs some care and attention to work. AFAIK > > it only works if your NIC actually supports PXE. > > naw -- no worries if your host cannot PXE, lacks a floppy, and > lacks a CD drive, so long as you have a hard drive, or the > capability to NFS boot no-root-squash (I cannot visualize > how the last would be able to NFS boot, and yet not PXE -- > maybe on an OpenBoot prom with rarpd -- it should be > possible on a Sparc port. I'll ask Tom Callaway ...). > > A. If it does not PXE and has a floppy, use etherboot I have used etherboot, it wants the kernel and initrd already combined (with mknbi). Actually, in some circumstances you can use GRUB too, but you need to configure serial support and support for the NICs. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with (my) 3C509s. > > > B. If it does not PXE and you don't want to use the floppy, > use a CD based boot -- see the RELEASE-NOTES for RHL 8.0 to build > the ISO; or the use the prebuilt in Phoebe-X > > > C. If it does not PXE and you don't want to use the floppy and > you don't want to use the CD, you can: > > 1/ Copy the ./images/pxeboot/* content into, say, > a newly created /boot/pxeboot/ > > 2/ Update /boot/grun/grub.conf to have a stanza pointing to > the kernel, the initrd, and passing along a proper ks.cfg > source I like this idea best;-) The reason I suggested separate partition is to keep the installer completely separate from everything else. An option to boot something else you never change, but would allow you access remotely would be handy for when something goes wrong. > I have not seen method C formally documented -- that is, > simply booting from hard drive into a kickstart based upgrade > -- (an install would work just as well). > > Clearly method C is not a Red Hat supported model -- heck, > while PXE file support is present, it is for advanced > installers. The issues of having a working PXE clients, DNS, > DHCP, TFTP, FTP and HTTP server make it really tricky to debug > if one is not systematic. Red Hat support could not > economically meet their commitment to purchasers to get > supported hardware installed in finite time, because there is > so much to go wrong. <g> It seems to me it's "near enough." The PXE kernel/initrd isn't limited by floppy disk size, and clearly has the network drivers you might need. pxelinux can be configured to pass IP= as a kernel parameter (see syslinux.doc), but that's not used by Anaconda. I like it! -- Please, reply only to the list.
