Re: Diskless boot?

Hi David!

Thanks for the reply and explanation. I tried setting up Tao installation 
DVD via PXE which worked through just out of the box using the 
standard RedHat GUI utils, even though I hate X :)

I was hoping there would be an easy way to setup several other isos that 
can be used as boot sources. I found some info about setting up Knoppix 
for PXE which involves installing Knoppix to harddisc and then moving the 
contents of the HD to an NFS share again.

For the system rescue cd that is gentoo based and a windows installation 
cd it will be even more difficult I guess, last time I checked Windows XP 
installer cd did not include grub and a kernel with initrd file :)

I am interested in the installation of thin/thick clients. I have some 
workstations with promise SATA 'raid' controllers that refuses to 
boot Tao. Booting Tao off the net would be great to still allow dual boot.

Thanks!
Remco

On Mon, 3 Jan 2005, David L. Parsley wrote:

> Hi Remco,
>
> Here's the short version:
> - normal tftp server and syslinux (pxelinux.0) is all you really need;
> probably, the pxelinux docs would be a good place to go
> - dchp needs to tell the pxe client the 'next-server' ip address, the
> the 'filename' to load; the tftp path to pxelinux.0
> - pxelinux.0, once it loads, will look for a config file which will
> instruct it where to load the kernel & initrd.
> - the initrd needs enough brains to load something else via nfs, etc.
>
> I do pretty heavy thin client & embedded appliance type work, so I use
> Tao Linux for serving PXE clients quite often.  Right now I'm working on
> a fairly generic, and hopefully powerful, initrd generator for booting
> from a wide variety of media, including network.  The only hitch here is
> you might need to get the kernel versions to match.  If you're
> interested, join the tao-tc mailing list (taolinux.org/tao-tc), where
> I'll post something with the next version of Tao-TC - now ThinTao.
>
> regards,
> 	David
>
> On Mon, 2005-01-03 at 07:24, Remco Barendse wrote:
>> Hi list!
>>
>> Has anyone successfully set-up a PXE server on Tao to setup diskless
>> clients? There is an excellent description on how to setup PXE
>> installation for new redhat boxes in the redhat documentation.
>>
>> I would like to setup other boot sources as well like:
>> - Knoppix
>> - Windows installation cd
>> - Linux system rescue cd (like www.sysresccd.org)
>> etc.
>>
>> These are all bootable cd-rom iso's and they will probably require a
>> different approach?
>>
>> Thanks for any input!
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>