Finnix Forums » Ideas & Suggestions

Alternate way of loading FINNIX and overlays (e.g. netboot)


  1. rfinnie
    Administrator

    Submitted by SourceForge user raken42

    To have 2 hooks for loading the FINNIX immage and content of overlay.d I've made a patch for initrd:/sbin/init. The interface are the variables FOUND_FINNIX, FINNIX_CLOOP and FOUND_OVERLAY.

    I'm using this to boot Finnix per pxelinix over network. Through mount-bind /tftpboot and /usr/ftp don't use much space. It's like a virus: every instance can be a server to boot an exact clone from :).

    My own netboot scripts are also appended. I donno if this is useful for anyone but me (and maybe not the "correct" way done), but how knows? I hope the 2 hooks or something similar seems useful enough to find inclusion.

    Apart from adding netcard module(s) to initrd a filetransfer program for FINNIX and content of overlay.d is needed. Tftp turned out to be too slow for 95 MB, so I use ftp. A Program without embellishments is fget (http://www.fefe.de/fget/) inch I use in a statically linked version (a little bit large in comparision but 400KB don't bother me). Is it possible to use /bin/init.debianstatic to save space? I have no clue what this file is good for, just a guess from the name.

    Happy finnixing,
    Raken

    http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1491935&group_id=3892&atid=103892
    Posted Wed, 21 Jun 2006 15:46:07 -0700

  2. rfinnie
    Administrator

    Interesting... I've wanted to look into netbooting Finnix for awhile now. I'll take a look at your patches.

    (Either way I'll probably have to do a lot of modifications, since the initrd has changed a LOT since 87.0.
    Posted Thu, 22 Jun 2006 05:46:18 -0700

  3. rfinnie
    Administrator

    The next release of Finnix will have PXE/netboot support. Thanks for the suggestions, but I've decided to do the more "classic" approach to netbooting. PXE loads the bootstrap program (pxelinux.0, from syslinux), pxelinux transfers and loads the linux kernel and initrd via TFTP, the initrd loads network drivers, and mounts a NFS mount point instead of a CDROM. I still have some tweaks to work out, but the code is pretty solid (and you can do it on machines with less than 192MB RAM).
    Posted Sun, 13 Aug 2006 09:22:56 -0700

  4. naitram
    Member

    What's the status on this? I'm looking at doing something very similar with a handful (err...couple thousand) old iMac computers. I was thinking of using finnix to base it off of, and if you're even in testing with this, it would save some work. On the other hand if you haven't started, maybe what I've got to do anyway will end up being useful to the project.
    Posted Wed, 06 Dec 2006 06:49:00 -0800

  5. rfinnie
    Administrator

    naitram wrote³:

    What's the status on this?


    The "next version of Finnix" is basically done, with full netboot functionality. I just need to set aside some time to finish images and mastering. Grab the latest daily snapshot, then run the "finnix-netboot-server" command and it should set everything up for you.
    Posted Thu, 07 Dec 2006 08:56:03 -0800

  6. naitram
    Member

    You sir, are my hero.

    Works great and has everything that is required to get this project moving.
    Posted Tue, 12 Dec 2006 05:42:14 -0800