PXE boot disks

Callahan, Michael MichaelCallahan at templeinland.com
Thu Jul 7 00:48:03 UTC 2005


IMO, it would be worth the work to go ahead and make the BIOS support PXE,
that assures that you will be able to use this in the future on any machine
in your datacenter.  Also make that a required step in your config sheet
when a new server comes in.  Using PXE I was able to put a new install on
40+ servers in less than 2 hours during a recent upgrade.  That's a lot of
floppies. 

-----Original Message-----
From: MW Mike Weiner (5028) [mailto:MWeiner at ag.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2005 10:18 AM
To: For users of Fedora Core releases; marcel at mesa.nl
Subject: RE: PXE boot disks

-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:fedora-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of MW Mike Weiner
(5028)
Sent: Wednesday, June 29, 2005 10:56 AM
To: For users of Fedora Core releases; marcel at mesa.nl
Subject: RE: PXE boot disks

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

--

Update, I changed the syslinux.cfg to say ks=floppy since I have the ks.cfg
on the local boot floppy. And that seems to get around that issue. Now, it
goes to NFS mount 10.10.232.54:/repo/fedora/linux/core/2/i386/os and it
fails to mount and basically bombs.

BTW, I have all this working via PXE, the issue is that I would have to have
the person in the data center redo the BIOS' across all 450 odd machines to
get the PXE boot to work, and a boot disk seemed to be less work to me,
simply stick it in, rather than changing default BIOS settings.

Any thoughts?

Michael Weiner

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