Diskless Booting?
Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Diskless Booting?
started by: erich
Posted by erich on Nov. 05 2004,02:48
Okay, I have DSL working from CD form and from USB dongle.Now I want to use diskless booting.
I can get PXE to load the kernel and initrd image, but I don't understand the linuxrc on the initrd image well enough to understand how to mount a NFS device instead of a USB device or however CDs are autodetected.
I think that DSL would make an excellent diskless network booting distribution.
Posted by AwPhuch on Nov. 05 2004,17:29
Very true!!Would be cool to see DSL as a network diskless workstation.
All it would take would be either a custom floppy (with network boot drivers
Roberts had a floppy NFS frugal install method but I cant find it anymore..
His method called for booting with networking support then query the download server to pull the iso and create a frugal type install...I dont see why this wouldnt work with some minor reworking...
Brian
AwPhuch
Posted by roberts on Nov. 06 2004,19:59
The network install can be found in the system FAQ.< http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/network-install.html >
Posted by greenlead on Nov. 07 2004,06:01
I would like to see this work like stateless linux, which is a new addition to the Fedora project.
Posted by gimlith on Nov. 08 2004,22:37
I think it will be really cool tu use a bootp system, to boot from a network card with nfsd, tftpd, dhcpd from server and only a diskless station as client.
Posted by erich on Nov. 14 2004,01:15
Network install isn't quite what I'm looking for.Using PXE and tftp, I can download and boot the linux kernel, and download the minirt24.gz as the initrd. No problems there.
All I want to do is modify the linuxrc in minirt24 so that it doesn't look for the knoppix image on a USB or CDROM drive, but looks for it over an NFS partition.
I just don't understand the linuxrc and how it looks for the knoppix image.
I don't want to install at all... I just want to boot directly off the network using PXE, TFTP, and NFS.
Posted by cbagger01 on Nov. 14 2004,11:27
The first problem that I can think of is that I don't think that networking is activated until AFTER the knoppix image is already loaded.This puts you in a catch-22 situation.
Posted by Del on Nov. 17 2004,20:22
Check out < http://www.bofh.be/clusterknoppix/ > and see how it's done there. You may find just what you're looking for and be able to apply it to DSL instead.
Posted by Nakarti on Dec. 11 2004,05:35
Easiest test subject: trick Knoppix(terminal-server) to use the DamnSmall image instead of the knoppix imageAnd, fwiw, it uses tftp, not nfs