Re: di-netboot-assistant - Debian-Installer netboot assistant
On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 16:49 +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> Hi Franklin,
>
> On Tuesday 03 June 2008, Franklin PIAT wrote:
> > I had a small home-made script to retrieve and untar Debian Installer
> > netboot images.
>
> I've just tried this again after installing your package from unstable.
> This time I got it working, but only after debugging and making some
> adjustments in the configuration. See bottom of mail for my server setup.
> With this dhcpd configuration both problems were fixed and I could use
> di-n-a without the workarounds.
> So, two changes:
> - adding the 'if exists dhcp-parameter-request-list' bit
> - overriding the default rootdir by setting pxelinux.pathprefix
I have updated the documentation to state that those options are
compulsory. I have also fixed the examples.
Finally I have included a working dhcpd.conf example, which should help.
Thank you for reporting this serious bug.
> Regarding the pathprefix. I'd actually prefer to use the default that
> seems to be set automatically on the basis of the location of the
> original "filename" option: "debian-installer/". Using that would mean
> that pxelinux.configfile could just be "pxelinux.cfg/default" and that
> the debian-installer prefix could be dropped in all your generated menus.
I would have to investigate how elilo.efi and vesamenu.c32 works.
... I can't remember all the pro and cons... I have to sleep on it.
> I also have a feature request: support for custom images.
> If I build a netboot image locally, I'd like to be able to add it to the
> menu somehow.
> Main thing is that these cannot be added to the di-n-a sources config file
> as there is no download location for them, so I need some way to just
> extract them into place and get them included in the menus.
>
> I see several options.
>
> 1) I create a custom "top-level" menu file that I specify in the dhcpd
> config and that has as one option to chainload to the di-n-a menu. This
> will work and gives complete freedom but disadvantage is an extra menu
> level and needing to maintain the menu by hand.
By hand... :-(
> 2) The same, but di-n-a learns how to include the custom menu file in the
> menu it generates automatically either by
> - just appending from a separate file, or
> - preserving manually added entries in the file itself (anything after
> some magic markers maybe, as grub does)
The file /etc/di-netboot-assistant/pxelinux.HEAD could be used.
But again, you might need to create a script to copy the files
in /var/lib/tftpboot/debian-installer/foobar...
> 3) I create a "debian-installer/custom" dir with subdirs and di-n-a is
> made smart enough to scan those for images and add them automatically by
> running something like 'di-n-a update'.
>
> What do you think? Preferably I'd be able to have several alternative
> custom images at the same time.
Are the filenames steady ? Do you have tarballs for them ?
I could implement file:// scheme. You would just have to declare a
repository like this in /etc/di-sources.list :
fjp1 i386 file://home/me/daily netboot/netboot.tar.gz
Franklin
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