work needed for network booting Debian Live
On Wednesday 26 April 2006 23:43, Andrew Donnellan wrote:
> Couldn't you use an option on the kernel commandline? Or store it on a
> floppy disc/USB drive? Many older computers can't netboot from BIOS,
> so something like this would be helpful. There's also things like
> BOOTP and so on that can be used.
Yes but why both? If you have the floppy/USB, that's all you need. No need to
add a CD to the mix.
Any computer made after ~1995 can be made to netboot with a proper network
card installed in it. That's what we do; we sell NIC cards for ~$20 people to
convert older PC's in to terminals. We used to do only LTSP but we are now
finding that "old PC" generally means something with at least 128 MB of RAM.
So, we thought it would be nice to run the full OS on those kinds of systems.
BOOTP is a deprecated protocol very similar to DHCP. DHCP replaces BOOTP in
every way. The process I described in my first email which uses DHCP is all
that is needed for network booting.
> Why would you need the kernel and initrd?
They are only needed in the case of trying to netboot /without/ PXE enabled
DHCP. You need them because you need to be able to get the network card
online so that it can talk to the server. That's what PXE enables. If you
don't have PXE, then you have to get the entire Linux network subsystem
online before mounting the root filesystem.
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