Bug#140579: Report: tftpboot install successfull

[Junichi Uekawa <dancer@netfort.gr.jp>]

> > I understand that. But just like we have a bunch of architectures, we
> > have a bunch of netboot options. You generally don't have a lot of
> > choices about what your hardware supports. Telling someone whose card
> > doesn't support pxe to use pxe because it's better is no more sensible
> > than telling an m68k user to use the i386 boot floppies because i386 is
> > better.
> 
> True enough.
> 
> So why does that prevent us from giving an overview of the various
> options and providing some criteria to help users pick one or the
> other?  It may be true that generally "better" or "worse" doesn't
> matter -- just anything that works will do.

On installing Debian, it would be very difficult for users
to get a ROM burning, however there would be a lot of 
eepro cards which can PXE boot.

I would rather like to be able to netboot with grub floppies,
so that it only requires one floppy (grub) to start up the
installation, but that requires an extracted image of the 
installation disk to use as NFS root, and a kernel vmlinuz image
available via TFTP. I don't think we provide either images
per default, but it might be worth considering for an 
option in the future, if grub cannot load tftpboot images.


For using GRUB to start install:

set up server to allow TFTP, and provide vmlinuz, and 
allow nfs export.

get grub source and recompile with network card support,
and create a floppy using dd command.


./configure --enable-eepro100 && make
dd if=stage1/stage1 of=image
dd if=stage2/stage2 of=image bs=512 seek=1
dd if=image of=/dev/fd0 ; sync
  



Then start the machine with the floppy (the following example will work on 
many installations):

grub> ifconfig --address=192.168.1.2 --server=192.168.1.1
grub> kernel (nd)/boot/vmlinuz init=/bin/sh root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=192.168.1.1:/,flags=ro init=/bin/sh
grub> boot


The above example will load the kernel via eepro card from
/boot/vmlinuz on 192.168.1.1, and use / of the 192.168.1.1
as the / of 192.168.1.2 (the one to be installed) read-only
via NFS, using /bin/sh as initial program.


It is trivial to start up dbootstrap in this way also.





regards,
	junichi