Howdy, I just came across this report in Debian's bug tracker. On Sun, 27 Feb 2011 16:22:28 -0400, Joey Hess wrote: > BOOTIF is a pxelinux boot parameter. It is supported by the Debian > initramfs when pxe booting, but it is not supported by the Debian > installer. > > Perhaps it should be. In the meantime, you can use the documented > preseeding interface of booting with interface=eth1. I don't think > netcfg allows specifying a interface by MAC though. Floris Bos mentioned that this is similar to an oldish bug (at least by Ubuntu standards) in Ubuntu's bug tracker against the netcfg package: provide a method to use a specified MAC-address as the installation device * https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/netcfg/+bug/56679 We have a proposed solution, in the attached script, S31pxedust. Adding 'ipappend 2' to the host's pxelinux config file makes PXELINUX append the mac address of that interface to the kernel options. * http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/SYSLINUX#IPAPPEND_flag_val_.5BPXELINUX_only.5D This allows the initrd to access to the mac address of the interface which PXE booted and is probably the interface we want to use for DHCP. Executing from the debian-installer-startup.d directory of the initrd, this script reads the value of the 'BOOTIF' kernel option and looks to see if there is an interface name with this mac address. If so, it then uses 'db_set' to change the 'netcfg/choose_interface' option to this interface name. Would you be willing to consider this approach? We'd absolutely like to avoid diverging from Debian in support of a BOOTIF kernel option for installations, and we have a great need for a supported approach. I'm willing and able to modify and test the attached boot accordingly. Please advise. Thanks, -- :-Dustin Dustin Kirkland Ubuntu Core Developer
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