[Gllug] Booting diskless with an initrd

[David Godfrey]

John Winters wrote:

> I have a diskless mini-ITX box which I can boot over the network using
> PXELINUX.  The one thing I've never managed to do is to get it to boot
> with an initrd.  I have to build my own kernel with all the necessary
> drivers built in instead of using standard Debian kernels.
> 
> Anyone ever succeeded in doing this?  

Not using pxelinux. I use grub built with diskless/network
support. Grub then handles the initrd loading and I find it works very
well.

e.g. from /etc/dhcpd.conf:

# Global settings
option grub-config code 150 = text;

#
# Diskless workstations
#
group {

#     Intel EEPro100/rtl8139 PXE GRUB network boot loader
      filename "pxegrub";

      host ego {hardware ethernet 00:a0:c9:a5:c4:4c; 
        fixed-address 10.1.1.6;
        option grub-config "(nd)/ego/menu.lst";
	}
}

and then from <tftproot>/ego/menu.lst:

title  2.6 RAMDISK Root
root (nd)
kernel /ego/Image-2.6 ro panic=60 load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 \
  ramdisk_size=25000 root=/dev/ram0
initrd /ego/initrd.gz

HTH

Regards
-- 
Dave Godfrey
dave at deltass.co.uk
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