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September 9, 2004

PXE Install

Filed under: Uncategorized — sven @ 10:14 GMT

Now that I got the hardware working, I had to install the systems with a properly configured operating system. The problem is this system has neither floppy or CDROM drive. It does, however, have PXE network cards. I boot the system onto a Debian Sarge nfs root partition. Here is a summary af what I did after that:

  1. Load the ide-detect module to find the ATA drives. Partition the drives, don’t forget swap.
  2. Use mkswap to prepare your swap partition, and mkfs to make the file systems.
  3. Mount all the partitions someplace like they will be mounted, I used /mnt. Mounting /proc files system can be useful too.
  4. Use Debian’s debootstrap command to install packages where you mounted the partitions.
  5. Use the chroot command and change to where you just installed the packages.
  6. Edit the /etc/hosts file, /proc/mounts is a good start. Don’t forget swap.
  7. Edit and create other files: /etc/apt/sources.list, /etc/hosts, /etc/kernel-img.conf, /etc/network/interfaces, /etc/hostname.
  8. Use apt-get and install a kernel, I installed resolvconf too and put resolver configuration in the /etc/network/interfaces file.
  9. Install GRUB, create the /boot/grub directory. Run the update-grub command.
  10. Follow directions in the Installation section of the GRUB manual, to install GRUB on the boot drive.
  11. Use passwd to set the root password.
  12. Reboot, make sure you are not booting PXE though.

After it comes up, set the time zone. Continue to configure normally.

3 Comments »

  1. er: General — sven @ 9:12 am EST In the beginning of September I installed four systems with Debian Sarge, a few weeks later I was rsyncing the old mixed Debian system back. Today I [...]

    Pingback by zen.org Communal Weblog » Uninstalling Sarge — December 2, 2004 @ 09:12 GMT

  2. Most of that even should be automatable I would think.

    I’m about to try your steps on 10 server on Thursday…hopefully it goes well.

    What was your DHCP setting and how’d you set that up? I am just starting to look into it but I’ve used debian long enough to hope it won’t be so bad. debbotstrap and chroot seem like one way to do it, but it’s more manual that I had hoped.

    Thanks,
    david

    Comment by David — December 14, 2004 @ 19:01 GMT

  3. Yes, it is very manual. Almost like doing a Gentoo Linux linux install. I used the dhcp3-server package that is a part of sarge. My entries dhcpd.conf file looks something like:

    ddns-update-style none;
allow bootp;
allow booting;
filename "pxelinux.0";
option domain-name "your-domain.org“;

subnet 1.2.3.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
 option routers 1.2.3.254;
 option domain-name-servers ns1.your-demain.com, ns2.your-domain.com;

 host hostname {
  option host-name “hostname“;
  hardware ethernet 00:01:03:1A:FC:B7;
  fixed-address 1.2.3.33;
 }

    All should work, assuming TFTP and NFS are set of correctly too.

    Comment by Sven Heinicke — December 15, 2004 @ 12:39 GMT

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