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Re: Installing Debian from NFS



On Wed, 2011-02-02 at 13:49 -0500, RR wrote:
Hello,
 
this may be a very obvious one of those things that I should just  "Google" but given my last experience, and unsuccessful Googling, I figured maybe I should ask the community as to what the CORRECT way to install Debian on a Sun machine such that it uses the ISO/Distribution on my local NFS server as opposed to just picking up the boot.img and then have the rest of it be downloaded from the Internet. I have a LOT of SUN machines to install and it'd be cool if I can just install them off the distro on the nfs server.

How about FAI ?  http://fai-project.org/

This is based around PXE Boot, NFS root file system for installer and unattended install. Slightly fiddly to get started, but afterwards it is smooth sailing.

 
The way my boot server is setup is, that it has tftp, /etc/ethers and /etc/hosts files all setup. I have the boot.img from Debian Lenny for sparc in /tftpboot and also have the hex and decimal/AF_INET format of the intended IP Address soft-linked to this boot.img in the /tftpboot directory i.e. 0A01030B -> boot.img. I also have the entire debian-DVD-lenny.iso available and is mounted on /mnt/iso by way of lofiadm so that /mnt/iso has the contents of the ISO and not the bundled iso image.
 
Now, how do I tell the installer to go pick it up from there? I have done a bit of research and all I see everywhere is mentions of some file called root.tar.gz and debian-installer and what not...but I can't figure out where do I get that from.
 
I have tried:
ok> boot net
 
and
 
ok> boot net - install nfsroot=10.1.3.1:/mnt/iso
 
and
 
ok> boot net install
 
Any one wish to comment?
 
Thanks so much
\RR
 

--

Karl E. Jørgensen
IT Operations
Fizzback Group

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