On Tuesday 2008 December 09 11:49:42 Ron Johnson wrote: >On 12/09/08 11:25, Micha Feigin wrote: >> On Tue, 09 Dec 2008 10:27:28 -0600 >> Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> wrote: >>> On 12/09/08 09:58, Micha Feigin wrote: >>>> I want to setup three machines to boot over the network from an nfs >>>> root. The network doesn't have a dhcp server (I prefer if it's possible >>>> to do it without one) and the network card is only supported with newer >>>> kernels (2.6.28-rc). >>>> >>>> Is there a way to do it through grub or do I need to setup a minimal >>>> system and boot from it? >>>> >>>> Any pointers on how to set this up? >>> >>> PXE boot seems like what you want, where the client's NIC requests >>> the boot files from the server. >>> >>> Or am I misunderstanding your questions? >> >> Yes, theoretically that is what I want, but if I'm not mistaken PXE boot >> is dependent on a dhcp server giving the machine an IP and declaring that >> it has a boot image to provide, or am I wrong. >> >> I want to give the ip as an option and use a given nfs server as a root, >> not resolve these values at run time > >Hmmm, yes, you're right. There's got to be a way, though, using >bootp, MAC address and tftp, since that's how we did it 10 years ago >with X Terminals. DHCP is an extension to bootp. Anything you were doing with bootp 10 years ago should be done with DHCP today. IIRC, dhcpd from ISC can do bootp without the DHCP extensions. And, yeah, for a full PXE boot, you will need a TFTP server on the network. (It could be the DHCP server, but doesn't have to be.) I could be wrong, but I believe that PXE is actually proprietary Intel extensions to and older, standard "netboot" protocol. If you just want NFS root, it's suppored by the kernel, I think something like root=IP:/path, but you'll need some storage in the clients for the bootloader, kernel image, and initrd (if any). If you want the kernel image and initrd loaded from the network, you'll need a DHCP server that responds to requests with the IP of the TFTP server (as path to the file?). That response will have to include some IP address, possibly with a very short lease, that the client will use during the TFTP download. This IP can, of course, be overridden with configuration in the kernel/initrd. You can do both and, if the client needs access to more data than fits in RAM, you'll need to. The kernel/initrd will be loaded from the TFTP server specified in the DHCP response. The initrd will then mount the NFS root filesystem and chroot/switch_root/pivot_root into it. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss03@volumehost.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.org/ \_/
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