Bug#140579: Report: tftpboot install successfull

[nb <nb@dagami.org>]

Le lun 30/12/2002 à 22:16, Adam DiCarlo a écrit :
> Is it just me, or isn't it rather a crippling problem that etherboot
> requires a floppy or other bootable medium to do the etherbooting?  I
> guess however, since there is no OpenBoot on x86, that's just the
> breaks.

I'm not sure I've understood everything

> Tell me, why is it interesting/useful to floppy-boot into etherboot
> rather than just floppy-booting from the rescue/root combo?  Just the
> issue of one floppy vs two?

I told you I have bought a very small computer. I want to make it a
firewall. I want it to be silent (no fans), not necessarily fast
(300MHz, for a firewall it's enough) and very very small. So it will not
have any floppy drive nor cdrom drive.
It will only have :
1/ a smart card
2/ an onboard network adapter with PXE capability.

So to put debian on it I need in either cases a tftp/bootp install.

I wanted to prepare myself to do it. That's why with a floppy disk I
simulate the smart card. But the best solution would be the PXE bios.
Thus if for some reason I need to reinstall it one day it would be easy.

But you are right. Someone whe has floppy disks has no need to
tftp-install. I have myself done many of them either with floppy then
network or cd-rom then network.

Completly off-topic I think in the near future we will have to usb boot
with different devices like pen-drive as I said before. This will be
easy with a kernel + a root image on the drive along with something like
isolinux. But that's an other story.


Last minute !

My motherboard has a network adapter on it and I finally succeded in
making it PXE boot. The process of installation has not begun because of
a problem of tftp tsize. I will tomorrow install tftpd-hpa which has not
this problem. I'm using for this my son's computer as tftp server mine
is the client. It's late now I'll tell you tomorrow how this goes.
-- 
nb <nb@dagami.org>