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### How to make my OpenSUSE installation boot via PXE ### |
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Booting from PXE is amazing. It allows one to have computers without a hard dis… |
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Few days ago, I decided to remove hard disks of all my workstation PCs at home,… |
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My distribution of choice (as far as we're talking about workstations) is OpenS… |
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Of course, this is not only true for OpenSUSE, and should be adaptable without … |
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* The "big picture" * |
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The whole idea is this: the workstation starts, and the BIOS of the network car… |
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The local DHCP server provides it with an IP address, a mask, a gateway, and fe… |
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The "next-server" field contains the IP address of a local TFTP server, and the… |
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Now, the PC loads the PXE image from the TFTP server. I am using the excellent … |
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When PXELINUX starts, it loads a configuration file from the TFTP server (pxeli… |
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Let's see the configuration of most important parts of our PXE architecture. |
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* DHCP * |
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I won't discuss DHCP configuration. It's pretty trivial, so you can figure it o… |
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* PXELINUX * |
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The PXE boot is assured by pxelinux. The configuration file of pxelinux is rath… |
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label OpenSUSE |
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menu label OpenSUSE |
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kernel suse_martyna/boot/vmlinuz |
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append initrd=suse_martyna/boot/initrd rootfstype=nfs root=/dev/nfs nfsroot… |
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* INITRD * |
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to prepare the mkinitrd: |
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mkinitrd -f nfs -D eth0 |
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This will add the required kernel modules and a dhcp client to the initrd, whic… |
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If your network card isn't working at initrd boot stage, you might want to spec… |
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You also might try to use "mkinitrd -A -D eth0", this one will generate a "mons… |
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WARNING: On OpenSUSE 11.4 (and maybe other versions) there is a bug that makes … |
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To fix it, I did on the nfs server, as root: |
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# cd <exported directory for the client's home> |
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# chroot . |
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# cd /boot |
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# mkdir img |
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# cd img |
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# gzip -cd /boot/initrd | cpio -imd --quiet |
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# cp /etc/{protocols,netconfig} etc |
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# find . | cpio --quiet -H newc -o | gzip -9 -n > /boot/initrd_patched |
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# cd /boot |
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# rm initrd |
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# ln -s initrd_patched initrd |
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# exit |
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* Root directory content * |
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Then rsync your fs (offline, eg. via a liveCD) to the remote server: |
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rsync -a /mnt/mydisk /srv/nfs/suse_root |
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* FSTAB * |
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in the fstab, replace the / entry with: |
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none / none |
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or (dunno which one is better) |
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/dev/nfs / nfs |
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* Other bits to know about * |
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Make sure that the network script won't be able to run (if it does, it could cr… |
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chmod -x /etc/init.d/network |
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Export the NFS share containing the root filesystem as such: |
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/srv/tftp/suse_root/ 192.168.190.24(rw,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check) |
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If you get a "FIBMAP: invalid argument" error after or during the boot of your … |
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