Subvert the dominant paradigm

Installing Debian on an ultraportable machine (no FDD, no CD) is fairly easy, but sometimes I get stuck.

To setup the PXE host I installed dhcp3-server and tftpd-hpa.

I used the netboot images at

http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/dists/lenny/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/

copying them to /var/lib/tftpboot and unpacking netboot.tar.gz.

I configured /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf for the target machine, using its MAC address. Don’t forget the ‘next-server’ option.

subnet 192.168.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {

}

host cmalu {
 hardware ethernet xa:xa:xa:xa:xa:xa ;
 filename "pxelinux.0";
 next-server 192.168.2.1;
 server-name "name";
 fixed-address 192.168.2.99;
 option routers 192.168.2.1;
 option domain-name-servers 192.168.2.1;
}

I then start tftpd like this:

 /usr/sbin/in.tftpd -v -v -v -l -s /var/lib/tftpboot

it logs to /var/log/daemon.log

The debian installer was looking for pxelinux.cfg/01-xa:xa:xa:xa:xa:xa so I copied pxelinux.cfg/default to that file.

Once the installer starts things are fairly simple.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 20th, 2008 at 4:45 pm and is filed under Open Source. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.