Problems installing RHEL3 through PXE+NFS

[Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni]

Hello all,

I am currently working on making a custom install of a RedHat
Enterprise Linux 3.0, and am now encountering problem I really don't
understand: when I try to install via PXE, it looks like the dependencies
have all been scratched, the installer just nistall package in the
alphabetical order, and therefore many packages just can't be installed
because they miss they prereqs, including the kernel itself.

Things are broken enought that the installer doesn't even notice that
LILO fails to install the boot sector, while I can see on VT5:

    Reading boot sector from /dev/hda
    Fatal: open /dev/hda: No such file or directory

I presume this last error is caused by the fact that many core packages
are missing.

The modifications I made to the installer are pretty small and consist
mostly of adding four installation classes which all inherit from the
Kickstart class, in order to read their configuration from kickstart
files present in the installation tree. The sole method defined in these
classes is _init_:

    def __init__(self, expert):
	KickstartBase.__init__(self, "/mnt/source/type4i.cfg", 0)
	self.installType = "install"
	self.interactive = 1

The really strange thing being that the ISO images created from the
same installation tree installs fine. I've just finished a successful
install inside Qemu while a PXE install on another machine just failed.

Here are the parameters from /tftpboot/linux-install/pxelinux.cfg/default
used to boot the PXE installation:

    label 2
      kernel rhel3u5/vmlinuz
      append initrd=rhel3u5/initrd.img ramdisk_size=10000
method=nfs:server:/rhel3u5/i386 lang=fr_FR.UTF-8 keymap=fr-latin1 ksdevice=link
ip=dhcp

Has anybody seen something like this before?


Thanks in advance

--
Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni

Close the world, txEn eht nepO.