KS file, floppy boot, and NIC not on boot floppy

[John Brookes]

I had a similar (minor) difficulty with Dell 2650s on account of their
Broadcom (gbit) nics and RAID array schtuff. All I did was to 'gzip -d' and
'mount -oloop' the image and stuck an appropriate bcm5700.o and aacraid.o
update on the image. Anyhoo, umounted it, zipped it back up and served it
via PXE. Worked a treat!

Cheers,

John Brookes
Quadrics
T: +44 (0)117 9155500
F: +44 (0)117 9075395
E: johnb at quadrics.com
W3: www.quadrics.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Derek Richardson [mailto:derek.richardson at pgs.com]
> Sent: 22 November 2002 18:11
> To: Todd_Henderson at isl-3com.com
> Cc: beowulf at beowulf.org; cos-sup at pgs.com
> Subject: Re : KS file, floppy boot, and NIC not on boot floppy
> 
> 
> Todd,
> I haven't read the entire thread of discussion, as my mail is 
> messed up 
> right now, but there's two ways that I've done it in the past :
> 1) just take the bootnet.img from the latest RedHat 
> distribution ( after 
> all, the kernel you boot for install doesn't have to match 
> what you use 
> later ) and, if you're doing a floppy install, you dd it to a 
> floppy ( 
> dd if=${cdTree}/images/bootnet.img of=/dev/fd0 ) or, if 
> you're doing a 
> PXE file, just do option #2 until you get to mounting the 
> bootnet image 
> and then copy initrd.img and vmlinuz to somewhere accessible 
> to PXE stuff ).
> 2) take same bootnet image, mount it as msdos loop device ( mount 
> -tmsdos -oloop bootnet.img /tmp/loop ), copy the initrd.img over 
> /tmp/something, gunzip the initrd ( gzip -dc initrd.img > 
> /tmp/initrd ), 
> mount that ( mkdir /tmp/initmnt ; mount -oloop /tmp/initrd 
> /tmp/initmnt 
> ), then uncompress the modules.cgz to somewhere ( cd /tmp ; zcat 
> /tmp/initmnt/modules/modules.cgz | cpio -i -d ).  By now, you should 
> have a a directory w/ a kernel version number sitting in /tmp ( i.e. 
> /tmp/2.4.2-2BOOT or somesuch ).  Now, provided that you have a module 
> available that matches the kernel, copy it into that 
> directory ( IIRC, 
> RedHat install kernels match the distro's shipping version 
> -BOOT kernel, 
> so you should be able to install 
> kernel-${smpArch}-${version}.${arch}.rpm and then copy over 
> the module 
> ), then recompress it w/ cpio ( can't remember flags off top 
> of my head, 
> left as exercise for you ;) ).  Then install this compressed file ( 
> which should be called modules.cgz ) back onto the mounted 
> initrd, make 
> sure the correct entry is in pcitable for that module + your 
> card ( if 
> it's too new to be in that bootnet's pcitable, pcitable table 
> controls 
> loading of module ), if it's not, look at 
> http://pciids.sourceforge.net/ 
> for your board, or you can pull some /proc investigation once 
> you have 
> kernel booted, I believe the /proc entry for the e1000 module should 
> give you the board ID.  Anyways, then just unmount and recompress 
> everything, as needed, to restore the "system" to the state it was 
> previously in, and you should be golden.
> I might not be %100 spot on w/ all the details, as I'm 
> largely reciting 
> this off my head and I haven't done it in a while, but feel free to 
> e-mail me back w/ any questions.  What model # NIC are you 
> trying to do 
> this off of?  Also, please ignore the cc: to cos-sup at pgs.com, 
> it's just 
> an information mailing list for my work, and I figured while I'm 
> rattling this out, my co-workers ought to hear it as well.
> Regards,
> Derek R.
> 
> -- 
> Linux Administrator
> derek.richardson at ieee.org
> derek.richardson at pgs.com
> Office 713-781-4000
> Cell 713-817-1197
> Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.
> 		-- Hunter S. Thompson
> 
> 
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