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Re: di-netboot-assistant - Debian-Installer netboot assistant



Hello Franklin,

On Wednesday 23 July 2008, Franklin PIAT wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-07-22 at 16:49 +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> > With this dhcpd configuration both problems were fixed and I could
> > use di-n-a without the workarounds.

I have one more issue for you.

I installed di-n-a on an Etch box (my DNS/DHCP/TFTP server runs stable), 
which means that debian-installer/pxelinux.0 is also taken from stable.
I also installed a number of images, both stable and testing.

When netbooting I would get your menu correctly, but after selecting a 
testing install, instead of the D-I syslinux screen I would get a 
completely white display.

I solved this by copying the pxelinux.0 from the testing image to the 
debian-installer directory. Apparently pxelinux.0 only gets loaded once 
(which makes sense) and thus the one in the debian-installer dir needs to 
be compatible with _all_ the images installed below it.

One possible solution to this would be to extract the version from 
pxelinux.0 files of images getting installed, check if that version is 
higher than the one of the current file in the debian-installer dir and 
then replace that with the higher version.

You could for example use this to get the version:
$ strings pxelinux.0 | \
  sed -rn "/^PXELINUX [.0-9]+/ s/^[^ ]* ([.0-9]+).*/\1/"
3.71

> > 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...  :-(

One problem with this.

When I tried that I found that you modify some paths inside downloaded 
images to make them fit inside your structure. This of course does not 
happen for custom built images if they are installed by hand.

I managed to work around this by using symlinks from within your structure 
to the custom images, while keeping the original paths inside the images.

I wonder if that might not be a more solid solution also for images that 
are downloaded by di-n-a. In general it's IMO not very nice to change 
things in "external" sources.

Let me know if you need more info on this. It was a while ago but I should 
be able to reproduce it without too much trouble.

Cheers,
FJP

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