[arch-general] [*] Re: Building netboot images

[Nilesh Govindarajan]

On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 10:06 PM, Piyush P Kurur <ppk> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 08, 2010 at 07:32:18PM +0530, Nilesh Govindarajan wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 8, 2010 at 12:41 PM, Piyush P Kurur <ppk at cse.iitk.ac.in> wrote:
>> >
>
>>
>> What I suggest is this -
>> http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Diskless_network_boot_NFS_root
>>
>
>  I saw the wiki. I am not looking for a diskless boot. We have
> here a pxelinux boot loader that allows people to select one of
> the distros that we mirror here and install it on their machine
> by just connecting to ethernet port here and enabling PXE boot.
> One of the images is that of arch.
>
> I definitely *do not* want the following
>
> (1) NFS mounts: I prefer to have all the stuff required for
> a netinstall in the initrd image. The actual packages will come
> from the local mirror. NFS is unnecessarily compilcated and would
> mean I have to also run an NFS server and cannot get away with a
> tftp server.
>
> (2) No custom kernel: I don't want a custom kernel. The standard
> kernel should be made to work.
>
>
> Besides I thought this is a good oppurtunity to hack a bit
> on image creation process.
>
>
> Best
>
> ppk
>

So you want to do a templated installation something like that of
kickstart availalbe in Fedora, Redhat and CentOS.

It is possible using Arch Installation Framework but it is under
development and not meant for use in production.

I have a small idea but I don't know if it will work or not. If it
works, it will be something great.

You have to hack mkinitcpio but in a different manner.

Add pacman.conf, mirrorlist (with your local LAN mirror on the top, if
you have one), a static version of pacman into an mkinitcpio image
using a kernel which will be used for netbooting.

Then in the sysinit, after adding the devices by udev, and network
config, run the pacman commands to install the OS via FTP mirror which
will preferrably use your LAN mirror.

Once you've prepared the basic kernel and the initrd, boot using PXE,
and let syslinux (or whatever PXE loader you're using) load our custom
initrd and kernel from TFTP server.

When this runs on the client machine, then pacman will execute the
install commands.

-- 
Nilesh Govindarajan
Site & Server Administrator
www.itech7.com