PXE Installation

Doug White dwhite at gumbysoft.com
Thu Jan 26 17:22:39 PST 2006


On Fri, 20 Jan 2006, Marten Vijn wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-01-20 at 03:36 +0100, Karel Miklav wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm trying to install FreeBSD 6.0 to a sub-notebook without
> > floppy or optical unit.
>
> > Please give me a hand, I'm playing with this for whole week.
> >
> nice game aint it? sure of your friends is tcpdump :)
>
>
> steps to follow (more below), create:
>
> 1 pxeboot
> 2 exports a nfs bootdir
> 3 populate bootdir
> 4 config dhcpd.conf
> 5 add hosts to dns or /etc/hosts
> 6 proper config for the bootdir

[...]

If the goal is to simply start sysinstall on the target then it is not
necessary to construct a fully-populated root filesystem for the purpose.
Just tell loader to use the mfsroot disk image that's in the boot/
directory and sysinstall will start up like it does when booting directly
from CD.

Instructions for this are at:

http://people.freebsd.org/~dwhite/pxeboot.html

Its fundamentally the same, except step 3 takes about 1 minute (cp -Rp)
instead of an hour.

Admittedly these instructions assume proficiency with configuring NFS,
DHCP, and so forth.  Its mainly a note to myself on how to do it. :)

The addition of vfs.root.mountfrom="ufs:/dev/md0c" line to loader.conf is
the key. The CDROM loader.rc already pulls in mfsroot.gz, you just have to
point the kernel at that image instead of the NFS root that pxeboot will
pass on.

-- 
Doug White                    |  FreeBSD: The Power to Serve
dwhite at gumbysoft.com          |  www.FreeBSD.org


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