Re: Booting Debian-live-501 over HTTP
Hello,
Sorry about the late reply.
2009/7/17 Pravin <shindepravin@gmail.com>:
> Hi,
> I am working on booting Debian over http, and I faced few problems and
> I attempted to solve them.
> Following is the approach I took and the the questions I have.
> I hope that you will find this work useful.
>
> I have been trying to use "httpfs" option to boot
> "debian-live-501-i386-gnome-desktop.iso".
As far as I know iso files are currently not supported by the httpfs method.
Support for these should not be too hard to add, though.
Perhaps the other net methods should support them, too.
> But I could not locate the httpfs program in initramfs. So I added
> httpfs and fusermount from
> http://httpfs.sourceforge.net to /bin of initramfs. With this
I am using httpfs regularly to boot squashfs images but the httpfs
program from sorceforge somehow did not work for me so I use my
modified version. Work is underway on getting this version into
Debian.
> modifications debian was able to boot
> from filesystem.squashfs hosted on remote webserver.
>
> I also wanted to be able to boot from
> "debian-live-501-i386-gnome-desktop.iso" in addition to
> "filesystem.squashfs". I attempted this by modifying "do_httpmount"
> to recognize ".iso" extension.
> I mount the iso on "${rootmnt}/iso" this iso is then mounted on "${mountpoint}".
>
> Here is the code snippet
> <code>
> if [ "${extension}" = "iso" ]
> then
> modprobe fuse
> modprobe loop
> mkdir -p "${rootmnt}/iso"
> httpfs "${url}" "${rootmnt}/iso"
> FILEPATH=`ls "${mountpoint}"/iso/*.iso`
> mount -t iso9660 $FILEPATH "${mountpoint}" -o loop -o ro
> return 0
> fi
> </code>
>
> I chose the location "${rootmnt}/iso" so that "run-init" will not try
> to delete it in "nuking initramfs" step.
> But still I am getting error
> "run-init: nuking initramfs contents: Directory not empty"
>
> I modified and re-compiled "run-init" for not ignoring the failure of
> nuke_dir("/") and included it in my initramfs.
Unfortunately, the run-init program is a bit of a voodoo and I myself
ended up modifying it to find out what it is doing.
It uses some weird heuristic to find out what should be nuked and what
should be kept.
I use a modified version that prints messages as it recursively nukes
directories so I can tell what went wrong if my system stops at this
point.
> With this ugly hack, I did managed to get past the error, but I got
> strange error when gnome GUI started.
> <error>
> There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon.
>
> Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not
> work correctly.
>
> The last error message was:
>
> Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote
> application did not send a reply, the message bus security blocked the reply,
> the reply timeout expired, or the
> network connection was broken
>
> GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you log in.
I am not running gnome in d-l so I would not know but I expect that
gnome works right in the gnome images.
Thanks
Michal
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