Boot dsl over network?

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: Boot dsl over network?
started by: unhappy_mage

Posted by unhappy_mage on Mar. 31 2005,04:49

Hello all,
I'm trying to get DSL booting over a network. The target application, for those interested, is a small quiet music box for my room. However, I'm running into some problems figuring out a way to do this. A few methods present themselves:
Add a KNOPPIX file to minirt24.gz and point it to that
Make a custom minirt.gz and point it to a nfs share
Basically, I'd like it to suck a bunch of stuff over the network and then not depend on the server for the rest of its uptime. The server that sends out the dhcp is a development box (for < fold-server >) and gets rebooted a lot, but once the machine's up, there's another server it can talk to to get the music.
Also, I'd like to put samba support in; would this take a remaster or what? I don't have any problems with doing that, but if there's a way to include the extension that's easier that'd be nice.

Thanks in advance,
Will

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Mar. 31 2005,04:59

I'm assuming you are meaning a PXE netboot, because that's what it sounds like you are describing.

Yes it's possible, I have done it, much to the dismay of the college lab admins.

My current setup is down to 3 floppies required to do it, but I think I can eventually slim it down to a single floppy (it was originally 5 floppies).

No, I will not post my floppy images here, because they are rediculously buggy, messy, and I do not feel that they are ready for public consumption.

Nor do I have the patience to explain how to make it work, or what is required, or support fixing the problems that users will have with them.

But if you know enough to set up a PXE boot system, you should be able to get it off the ground, without too much difficulty.

Especially if you know more than me, which won't take much.

Posted by unhappy_mage on Mar. 31 2005,05:07

I have got a pxe setup working, in fact I built my own rootdisk for it.

What are the floppies for? I would think that once the network's going you could send it all via that.

Can you give me an overview of how it boots? I can go from there. Example:
Boot off floppy 1
Pull data from network from minirt24.gz
Load data from floppies 2-3
Pull KNOPPIX from network
Continue with boot process

or something like that.
Thanks for at least letting me know it's possible.

Posted by SaidinUnleashed on Mar. 31 2005,16:06

My floppies (like I said, they're SLOPPY) do the same thing, they grab the knoppix image from a nfs server, copy it toram, and boot DSL in much the same way as it's done after loading the cd toram.

I'll admit I cheated and used the DeLi netinst floppies as a starting point, and most of the bulk is left over from that, but I can also use the floppies to boot from the DSL knoppix image on my FTP (which was the original goal anyway).

I hope to be able to get it down to a single floppy, where the only options are PXE boot, or netinst, but I'm not sure I'll be able to trim it down that much.

It might still be 2 or 3 floppies, but it's still very cool.

Posted by gurru on April 24 2005,07:03

Why are you using floppies at all?
Does you nic & bios not support pxe?

Are you using Peter's PXELINUX
< http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php >

It's really a lot like SYSLINUX.
Since DSL works with this already it made it easy..er hmm.
All you need to serve PXE is DHCP & TFTP

DSL loads pretty fast! I use it at work, on IBM 2Ghz w/512MB

here's another usefull link...
< http://netboot.sourceforge.net/texts/HOWTO.html >

I had to do lot of tweaking because the environment I run in
already has a pxe DHCP server. So I had to mod it so my DHCP
server would only answer certain IDs and not the other
controllers on the network. That was the hard part.

That should at least point you in the right direction.

Thanks
-Garry

Posted by L-Plate on April 27 2005,09:43

Gurru,

I can boot the linux24 kernel and minirt24.gz. But how do I get the knoppix files to load from the pxe server. (I'm using Tftpd32 and PxeLinux).

my default lines are

kernel linux24
APPEND ramdisk_100000 init=/etc/init initrd=minirt24.gz Boot_Image=knoppix

Cheers

L-Plate

Posted by jconlon on May 17 2005,18:54

I too am stuck trying to get the KNOPPIX file system to load on a diskless computer. I get the mini root and the Kernel to load but not the filesystem.

I get to the prompt:

Can't find KNOPPIX filesystem, sorry.

Before I am dropped into a constrained shell.

I am using a PXE enabled mini-itx as a diskless client, dnsmasq as the DHCP server, and TFTP, PXELinux, an NFS on a RH 9 workstation, kernel and mini root from the dsl 1.1 release.

Here is my pxelinux.cfg:
----------------------------------
DEFAULT linux24
APPEND root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.1.8:/var/tftpboot/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init initrd=minirt24.gz BOOT_IMAGE=/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX vga=791 frugal nomce nodma
IPAPPEND 1
-----------------------------------

Can someone point out where I have blundered?
thank you,
A DSL Newbie

Posted by jconlon on May 23 2005,15:59

Still working on resolving my problem with DSL network booting from time to time and from what little I know it looks like I need to modify the linuxrc within the mini root. My current thinking is that I will need change it to mount the KNOPPIX directory on my server as a nfs mount so I can then mount the KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX cloop.

Don't have much confidence in this idea, so it is just a thought to shoot at for now.

Any criticism or alternatives would be appreciated.

Posted by Larry007 on May 31 2005,07:12

Quote (jconlon @ May 17 2005,14:54)

Hi,

I am also wanting to try this out and hoped to find more help on this topic.

However, I did manage to get another great distro running on FC3 - GeexBox!!! Only thing that I can point out (after much trail and error myself), is that the line: BOOT_IMAGE=/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX
actually needs to include the filename of the image itself as well as (I think it was something like "linuz.0" on Geexbox)

Anyway, I 'll try it out this week sometime and will post my settings on FEDORA CORE 3 as soon as I cracked it. I think this would be SO helpful for home. I'll probably cut it down and even use it to dual boot our lab machines at work! :cool:

Posted by phh on June 07 2005,12:33

Gurru,

Were you able to do it without using NFS?

phh

Posted by friedgold on June 07 2005,16:49

The current linuxrc in the initrd (minirt24.gz) of DSL searches the cdrom, any hard drive partitions it comes across and any usb storage devices it come across for a /KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX file (i.e. the root filesystem). Once it is found the drive containing this file is mounted to /cdrom. Then the /cdrom/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX image is mounted to /KNOPPIX, symlinks to this filesystem are setup and the standard init process is started.

I imagine that in order to get PXE boot working you'll need to modify the linuxrc thats in the initrd to mount the nfs share as /cdrom. Once this is done the remainder of the boot process should work unchanged. You'll need the network to be up before it is mounted so I imagine this would require the modules for your network card + ifconfig to be part of the initrd. But adding ifconfig to the initrd may be difficult since there would be various dependencies which would also need to be added. A static compile may help here.

Seeing as DSL's boot process is basically the same as knoppix's it would be a good idea to look around for info on getting knoppix to boot over a network - much of it will apply to DSL.

I wonder if the initrd for knoppix < on this page > could be modified to work with DSL?

Posted by dougvega on June 07 2005,21:25

what about installing the Debian-edu-config metapackage developed by Skolelinux
I am able to boot skolelinux via pxe , maybe they can be apt-get from the debian repositories that will make a verry fast server a la LTSP.

Posted by jconlon on June 07 2005,22:36

Bingo!

friedgold's question.
"I wonder if the initrd for knoppix ... could be modified to work with DSL?"
Answer - YES!

I haven't cleaned it up completely but I wanted to get the post out to the list.

Step 0 Set up your DHCP server and TFTP server

Step 1. Setup your NFS server to offer the DSL KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX
my exported fs is /var/dsl
with the dsl KNOPPIX filesystem it looks like /var/dsl/KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX

Step 2. Download the knoppix tar for pxe
< knoppix.pxe >

Step 3. Untar it and place the contents of its knoppix directory into your TFTP server
mine looks like:
/var/tftpboot/ <files from the tar>

Step 4. Modify the
<yourTftpbooDir>/pxelinux.cfg/default
file to change the nfsdir variables.
I changed mine to:
nfsdir=192.168.1.8:/var/dsl

Boot!
thanks guys,

John Conlon

Posted by ico2 on June 12 2005,21:16

surely just use the network boot floppy and serve it using tftp instead of a floppy drive?