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How do I Network Boot my Workstations?

I have Damn Small Linux Running on my workstations (30). I use it only to remote in to our Windows 2003 terminal server.

I would like to go diskless and use the "Network Boot" option available through my bios. I understand the concept of having a server that serves the inage, but that is about as far as it goes.

I was going to try the etherboot / rom-o-matic route, but they do not have a module for my onboard lan (RTL8101L).

Is there a simple step by step on:

1) how to create the image of Damn Small Linux (Just a simple ISO?)
2) How to setup the server
(Can I serve the image from my windows server 2003 box?)
(I have ipcop (linux box) setup as my firewall/filter/proxy)
3) Any mods on my workstations

If anyone would like to give me the step by steps i would be willing to open seperate questions and give more points.

Thanks,
Russ

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alextoft

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alextoft

The first thing you'd have to do is pull the DSL filesystem to pieces. Boot off a DSL cd, then mount yourself a network drive. This little bit is from memory as I don't have a machine I can try it on right at the moment. May have chance later.

Copy the kernel (/boot/linux24 I think) to the network drive, and rename it to something useful, like dslkernel

Now you need to create a filesystem within a file, so use
dd if=/dev/zero of=/networkmount/filesystem bs=1M count=128
and format it to ext2
mkfs.ext2 /networkmount/filesystem
It will say it's not a block device, but proceed anyway.

Now create a mount point and mount the file.
mount -t ext2 /networkmount/filesystem /your/mountpoint
From a command prompt, use the mount command to list all filesystem mounts. Find the read-only cloop DSL filesystem (ie. NOT the copy in the ramdrive). Copy /bin /sbin /etc /lib (everything except /dev and /proc) to the mounted file you just created. Create empty /dev and /proc entries there aswell; these will be populated by DSL when it boots. Now unmount the file; umount /your/mountpoint, and gzip it.

You should now have 2 files: dslkernel and filesystem.gz

Now you need to configure a DHCP server with boot extensions. This is an example dhcpd.conf:

allow booting;
allow bootp;

authoritative;
default-lease-time 3600;

ddns-update-style none;
option domain-name "example.com";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.200.50;

group {
next-server 192.168.200.50;
filename "pxelinux.0";

subnet 192.168.200.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.200.101 192.168.200.190;
default-lease-time 3600;
max-lease-time 172800;

The main thing is to ensure you have the allow boot entries, the next-server IP address, and the filename to download.

The IP address you specify must have a tftp server running on it. This can be Windows or Linux, doesn't matter. The contents of your tftp server root should look like this:

# ls -R /tftpboot/
/tftpboot/:
boot.msg linux pxelinux.0 pxelinux.cfg

/tftpboot/linux:
filesystem.gz dslkernel

/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg:
default

You know what the files in the linux directory are, but here's what the others are:

boot.msg is just a text file. Can say anything you like, but something like "Enter 1 and push return to boot Damn Small Linux". pxelinux.0 is a binary file from the SYSlinux package - http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/syslinux-3.36.tar.gz

In the pxelinux.cfg directory, create a file called default - this is the control file for PXElinux, and is in Grub format. It should look something like this:

default 1
prompt 1
timeout 6000
display boot.msg
F1 boot.msg
label 1
kernel linux/dslkernel
append initrd=linux/filesystem.gz rw root=/dev/ram ramdisk_size=2000000 vga=1

Then technically what should happen is you hit f12 (or whatever) to network boot, and you should get the boot.msg displayed. Press 1 and hit enter, and the kernel is downloaded and booted. The filesystem.gz is unpacked into the ramdrive and mounted. DSL then runs.

I guarantee it won't work the first time you try it, but let me know how you get on :)