2.4.10-devfs, debian-installer, debootstrap, powerpc - experiment
It was quite a long story to get a net-image to build
for powerpc, but I got it done after 'apt-get source'ing
a few udebs.
Some notes on that process:
the default wget-retriever on the debian mirrors
is coded to look for woody, and this breaks cause
it can't find the Pakcages or udebs or whatever
can't remember, so apt-get source wget-retriever
and building it fixed that as it is set to sid.
the Makefile in build looks for vmlinuz, but
that don't jive with powerpc, so I just
hacked it a few laces to get it to grab vmlinux
instead, and added a line to copy that sucker into
the tree so the makefile find it when it needs it.
Although I was netbooting, so didn't really matter I guess.
Of course the other thing is to remember not to pass
a "root=/dev/ram" option or their whole
thing with initrd fails to run and you don't get the ramfs
and you don't get proc mounted.
Ok, anyway, that was last week and I can't remember it to well anyway.
What I want to ask about is today's experiment
where i brought the net-image initrd up
and did the DHCP, and then did some wgets by hand
to grab debootstrap files such as
/usr/sbin/debootstrap
/usr/lib/debootstrap/functions
/usr/lib/debootstrap/pkgdetails
/usr/lib/debootstrap/drivers.tgz
/usr/lib/debootstrap/scripts/woody
Hmm. yeah, I told it to get woody not sid. Oh well.
So i do:
sh debootstrap --arch powerpc woody /target http://my.fastest.mirror/debian
and it grabs all the stuff and starts doing its things on the packages
but twhen it gets to:
Setting up sysvinit (0.50.17-7) ..
Creating /dev/initctl
it hangs after printing that and I can't do anything with the keyboard other
than blink the num lock and caps lock keys.
Also the screen blanked out after 5 minutes or so, so it wasn't
a total hang, just a loss of control.
I wonder if that had to do with the "init q" line at the
end of sysvinit.postinst ?
That is my question.
Of course yes I understand that debian-installer is totally
"in development" (aka, not developed yet) :)
but I want to modify a boot-disk and after reading all the
notes about how boot-floppies is going to be
.. obsoleted, I don't want to make contributions
that will be in vain.
...
Now that the questions are out of the way, some discussion of what
I want to get out of debian-installer.
I want to be able to do a netboot with debian-installer
that the initrd when it boots, uses the "module" feature
to grab configuration modules.. from my master control server.
(I am building a cluster.)
Maybe these modules can also obey
the DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive that debconf and
base-config do.
Maybe also I can wget templates for the modules
from the MCS (master control server) that control
the configuration choices that are taken by the modules.
This way I don't have to build a new net-initrd every
time I want to change the way I bring up(install?) the cluster
(ok, so it is just the installation of the cluster -
but maybe there might be other ways to use this than just
for installation.)
Maybe there could be an optional ssh.udeb that could be configured
(using debconf templates maybe ?) to sit and wait for
the MCS to connect, and not do anything else.
...
So.. getting back to my question about sysvinit,
is the problem . if it is with "init q" due to me runing devfs ?
Hmm. I need to do more poking around.
Thanks for your attention,
Peter
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