Bug#530616: debian-installer: netboot tarball needs a symlink to enable PXE booting from multiple installers.
Package: debian-installer
Severity: normal
The netboot.tar.gz tarball has symlinks at the top level from pxelinux.0 to
debian-installer/$ARCH/pxelinux.0 and pxelinux.cfg to debian-installer/$ARCH/pxelinux.cfg
This causes a problem is more than one arch netboot is installed, or if
the Ubuntu netboot tarball is installed, since the symlinks trample on
each other.
The simplest way to avoid this when setting up a multi-arch/distro boot
server is to ignore the top-level symlinks, and set the bootfile name
in the DHCP/PXE config to include the directory, so instead of using a
filename pxelinux.0, use the filename debian-installer/$ARCH/pxelinux.0
PXE ROMs are bright enough to spot and use the prefixed directory, so
they continue to download files from there; pxelinux.cfg is found, no
problem.
The problem occurs with all of the boot screens, etc, whose paths inside
pxelinux.cfg already include the debian-installer/$ARCH/ prefix. The PXE
ROM adds the path again, and tries to tftp eg.
debian-installer/$ARCH/debian-installer/$ARCH/boot-screens/splash.png
The simplest way to fix this, is to add a symlink in the netboot tarball
from debian-installer/$ARCH/debian-installer to ../../debian-installer.
This is completely backwards compatible, it doesn't affect the majority
who continue to rely on the top-level symlinks and a simple DHCP
filenname config, but it does allow more complex configurations to work
without manually making the link.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0
APT prefers testing
APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.24-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=en_GB, LC_CTYPE=en_GB (charmap=ISO-8859-1)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
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