Proposal for solution to the PXE install support when offline
The Lenny version of Skolelinux/Debian Edu will automatically set up a
PXE boot option on the main network, with support for installing
directly from the net using a preseeded version of the normal
installer. This option is only enabled when the main-server has
access to the Internet when installing, because it need access to the
Debian Installer netboot images to get this working. These images are
currently not available as .debs, but only as tarballs in the Debian
mirrors. The net effect is that the DVD install do not have this PXE
feature, while the netinst installation do. I want the DVD installs
to also get a working PXE installation setup, and have looked at
alternative solutions. There are two principal alternatives:
a) Make the images available as debs and put these debs on the DVD
b) Make the images available as tarballs on the DVD
Either way, these images need to make it to the installed system, so
for the .deb based solution one need to install an extra package,
while for the tarball solution one need to rewrite the DVD build and
the installer to put the tarball on the DVD and copy them from the DVD
into the installed system. To avoid that much changes to get a few
files into the installed system, and because I want to avoid
"orphaned" files in the file system on the main server after
installation (aka files not belonging to any package), I propose to
use alternative a).
I tried last summer to convince the Debian Installer developer team to
make debs of the d-i images, but no-one found time to work on it, and
it is thus missing for Lenny. I believe the best time to generate
such debs is when the images themselves are generated, and thus
believe the proper place to solve this is to modify the d-i release
process to also generate debs with images.
As this did not happen for Lenny, we need to make a hack in Debian
Edu/Lenny to solve it for us, and I have implemented such hack. It
consist of a deb (d-i-bootimages) consisting of copies of the tarballs
fetched from a Debian mirror. The source is simple, just wget/cp to
get the images in place. I've uploaded this package to our lenny-test
archive and it is waiting in NEW. This hack further consist of adding
the d-i-bootimages package to the main-server task, and modifying the
debian-edu-pxeinstall script to use the tarballs from
/usr/share/d-i-bootimages/ if they exist, and only wget them from a
mirror as before if they are missing on the local machine.
As this hack is unlikely to make it to Debian proper, I was asked by
Holger after asking him to approve the NEW package to ask for approval
in an email instead of using IRC (and he changed the policy on
<URL:http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu/ArchivePolicy> to state that IRC
should not be used, see other thread about that change).
I believe this solution is the best way to solve the issue, and thus
believe we should use it for Lenny. For Squeeze, I hope someone can
spent time with the d-i release process to make sure such image debs
are provided as part of the normal d-i build process.
The d-i-bootimages package now contain i386 and amd64 images in one
deb. It might make sense to split it into two binary packages, or
include powerpc images in the one package. I do not know what images
powerpc needs, so I have not tried to copy any such images into the
package yet.
Happy hacking,
--
Petter Reinholdtsen
Reply to: