[et-mgmt-tools] re: "invalid kernel" -- found the problem!

[Michael DeHaan]

>
>
> The problem is, that FreeBSD doesn't use pxelinux to boot - it has its 
> own PXE-bootloader.
> Then, the equivalent of the ks.cfg file goes into the compressed 
> msfroot filesystem image, which would be a major pain to adapt.

The seperately bootloader itself would not be a show stopper -- there is 
already some code there to supply elilo and alternate config files as 
opposed to syslinux.

The ks.cfg problem, however would be annoying... however that doesn't 
sound that far off from what koan does with initrd's to get around DHCP 
timeouts. One potential solution would be to
try to make a ks.cfg equivalent that includes the rest of the 
"kickstart" contents based on the result of a CGI script, so you only 
have to generate the initrd once. That's
ugly though.

The problem with generating all variances server side (which is why 
cobbler doesn't do it server side) for PXE setups (as opposed to 
reinstalls) is that you end up generating an initrd for every profile/system
and that takes up a lot of space ... more importantly, it's just a slow 
thing to do.

> It also likes to work via FTP only (all the example scripts have NFS 
> commented out and setup FTP instead - as if everybody had tried and 
> then settled for the obvious.
>
> I must look at that at some point - there's a howto about converting a 
> FreeBSD-ISO for PXE-booting with pxelinux here: 
> http://phaq.phunsites.net/?s=pxe

Fun...