wiki:PXEInstall

Version 3 (modified by jdreed, 13 years ago) (diff)

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PXE Installation

This page covers PXE installation. The actual Debathena Installer is covered in a separate page.

The PXE Server

The PXE server is maintained by the Network team, running PXELINUX. There is an entry called "Debathena". Currently, it contains a Natty kernel and initrd from the i386 netboot images. We should try and keep this up to date periodically, and will definitely need to do so for hardware support (the kernel needs to support the NICs in all supported machines).

The following command line is passed to the kernel: netcfg/get_hostname=athena-pxe-install locale=en_US keyboard-configuration/layoutcode=us interface=auto url=http://18.9.60.73/installer/current/debathena.preseed

Notes:

  • We have to specify a hostname. It will get overwritten by the DHCP config, but if DHCP barfs (which it will) or if it gets given an address with no PTR record (which it will), it needs a value there or the Debian installer fails miserably.