PXE boot disks

[John Summerfied]

MW Mike Weiner (5028) wrote:
> I have been down this road before, but am running into some issues. OK,
> what I am trying to do is create a "boot disk" such that someone in our
> data center can simply stick the disk in the floppy, reboot the server
> and it will boot off of that, and begin the kickstart install. So to
> that end, I have the following in my syslinux.cfg:
> 
> default linux
> prompt 1
> timeout 600
> 
> display snake.msg
> 
> F1 boot.msg
> F2 general.msg
> F3 expert.msg
> F4 param.msg
> F5 rescue.msg
> F7 snake.msg
> 
> DEFAULT linux
> LABEL linux
> KERNEL vmlinuz
> APPEND ksdevice=eth0 console=tty0 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0
> initrd=initrd.img network ip=dhcp ks=nfs:10.10.232.54:/tftpboot/ks.cfg
> selinux=0
> 
> However, when it boots off of the diskette, It ends up failing
> complaining that it cannot mount / nor find /tmp/ks.cfg
> 
> Any pointers?

I had all this working, but I recently had a Nasty Accident with a drive 
failure _and_ most of my backup useless so it's lost.

However, I've recently used a boot CD and that is way cool. Don't need 
to fiddle around with obscure DHCP options (though I do have those), I 
fiddled with the boot CD so it starts a network install without delay, 
and fetches a dynamically-created ks file off my server.

As soon as I detect that anaconda's running I eject and confiscate the 
CD. Works well, even with my systems that lack boot roms or have dodgy ones.

A refinement would be to eject the CD in %pre, or to patch anaconda to 
do it just before going to the network.


-- 

Cheers
John

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