On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 10:52:08AM +0100, Daniel Lang wrote: > Hi, > > Matthew D. Fuller wrote on Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 01:58:11AM -0600: > [..] > > And, further, some of us don't have (and don't want) CD burners, and even > > if we had 'em, don't want to burn (no pun intended ;) a CD blank just to > > install an OS, when we can just (re-)use 2 floppies and do it across the > > LAN from a local FTP mirror, which is as fast as a CD drive anyway. > > That's no point, as you can use a CD-RW, so no media is wasted. > Install over LAN is done anyway, as Scott mentioned only the > basic boot/install-strap is put into the emulated image. > > However, I second the point, that there is recent hardware around > which cannot have a CD-Drive attached, but a floppy drive, because > of space constraints. > > On the other hand, I guess such systems are able to boot over > the network. I'd love to see a integrated boot and installation > procedure that utilizes PXE (or any other network boot method) > and advocates it. (In this regard I just love Suns).
PXE installs are fun and easy. I use them for the no removable media boxes on our cluster when I need a local install for testing. The process is roughly (See Alfred's PXE article for details. Just ignore the kernel mods.): mount an install cd (assuming /cdrom as mountpoint) export /cdrom via nfs point a tftpd server at /cdrom configure a dhcpd with the necessicary lines to boot from /boot/pxeboot boot and install (I think you may need to choose to do an nfs install in sysinstall, but I'm not 100% sure of that.) I think it would be really cool if someone would add a feature to disk 1 to become a PXE install server. It should be fairly straight forward other then dealing with sysinstall. -- Brooks -- Any statement of the form "X is the one, true Y" is FALSE. PGP fingerprint 655D 519C 26A7 82E7 2529 9BF0 5D8E 8BE9 F238 1AD4
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