Re: lenny Installer with PXE on HP DL360G5 / bnx2
* Jérémy Bobbio <lunar@debian.org> [080909 23:11]:
> On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 03:29:42PM +0200, Christian Hofstaedtler wrote:
> > We've got quite a few machines from HP, of type ProLiant DL360 G5. We
> > used to install etch using the etch installer netboot media +
> > pxelinux. This worked quite fine.
> >
> > Now I'm testing lenny (beta2 installer), and I found that the network
> > cards in these servers (bnx2) seem to require a firmware, which is not
> > in the installer image, but is available seperately. As the firmware is
> > not in the image, and I'm booting from a PXE server, installing just
> > doesn't work (without plugging in an USB key, but that makes booting
> > from PXE quite useless).
>
> Please use the daily builds instead of beta2 to do your tests. A lot of
> issues present in the beta 2 have been addressed since.
Will try again with those.
> > Is this the intended behaviour?
>
> Yes: Debian is 100% free software and the firmware needed for bnx2 is
> not. The other option would have been to completely remove the bnx2
> module from kernel shipped by Debian.
I fully understand. Why was this then OK for etch, but not for
lenny? (Not wanting to start a discussion about this, just want to
know why things have changed.)
> > How is one supposed to install from the network/PXE on such common
> > hardware?
>
> You will need to add the firmware to the initrd.gz available on your
> TFTP server. You can find it in the bnx2-firmware package in the
> non-free section of the archive. Then use gzip and cpio to extract and
> compress the image again:
>
> * Extract in current directory:
> $ zcat /path/to/installer/initrd.gz | cpio -iv
>
> * Create a new image from the current directory:
> $ find . -print0 | cpio -0 -H newc -ov | \
> gzip -c > /path/to/installer/initrd.gz
Thanks for the instructions.
Chris
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