DSL Ideas and Suggestions :: Boot dsl over network?



Hello all,
 I'm trying to get DSL booting over a network.  The target application, for those interested, is a small quiet music box for my room.  However, I'm running into some problems figuring out a way to do this.  A few methods present themselves:
Add a KNOPPIX file to minirt24.gz and point it to that
Make a custom minirt.gz and point it to a nfs share
Basically, I'd like it to suck a bunch of stuff over the network and then not depend on the server for the rest of its uptime.  The server that sends out the dhcp is a development box (for fold-server) and gets rebooted a lot, but once the machine's up, there's another server it can talk to to get the music.
Also, I'd like to put samba support in; would this take a remaster or what?  I don't have any problems with doing that, but if there's a way to include the extension that's easier that'd be nice.

Thanks in advance,
Will
I'm assuming you are meaning a PXE netboot, because that's what it sounds like you are describing.

Yes it's possible, I have done it, much to the dismay of the college lab admins.

My current setup is down to 3 floppies required to do it, but I think I can eventually slim it down to a single floppy (it was originally 5 floppies).

No, I will not post my floppy images here, because they are rediculously buggy, messy, and I do not feel that they are ready for public consumption.

Nor do I have the patience to explain how to make it work, or what is required, or support fixing the problems that users will have with them.

But if you know enough to set up a PXE boot system, you should be able to get it off the ground, without too much difficulty.

Especially if you know more than me, which won't take much.
I have got a pxe setup working, in fact I built my own rootdisk for it.

What are the floppies for?  I would think that once the network's going you could send it all via that.

Can you give me an overview of how it boots?  I can go from there.  Example:
Boot off floppy 1
Pull data from network from minirt24.gz
Load data from floppies 2-3
Pull KNOPPIX from network
Continue with boot process

or something like that.
Thanks for at least letting me know it's possible. :)
My floppies (like I said, they're SLOPPY) do the same thing, they grab the knoppix image from a nfs server, copy it toram, and boot DSL in much the same way as it's done after loading the cd toram.

I'll admit I cheated and used the DeLi netinst floppies as a starting point, and most of the bulk is left over from that, but I can also use the floppies to boot from the DSL knoppix image on my FTP (which was the original goal anyway).

I hope to be able to get it down to a single floppy, where the only options are PXE boot, or netinst, but I'm not sure I'll be able to trim it down that much.

It might still be 2 or 3 floppies, but it's still very cool.
Why are you using floppies at all?
Does you nic & bios not support pxe?

Are you using Peter's PXELINUX
http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php

It's really a lot like SYSLINUX.
Since DSL works with this already it made it easy..er  hmm.
All you need to serve PXE is DHCP & TFTP

DSL loads pretty fast! I use it at work, on IBM 2Ghz w/512MB

here's another usefull link...
http://netboot.sourceforge.net/texts/HOWTO.html

I had to do lot of tweaking because the environment I run in
already has a pxe DHCP server. So I had to mod it so my DHCP
server would only answer certain IDs and not the other
controllers on the network. That was the hard part.

That should at least point you in the right direction.

Thanks
-Garry
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