Hi,

I've been playing around with a netboot server. I got it to work, but I can't get it to work, if you know what I mean.

--Right now it's working 100% reliably with the initrd taken from the Slackware 12.1 install DVD. This boots the client into the recognizable Slackware installer.
But I don't want that.

What I want is an initrd that will 1) boot without leading to a kernel panic, as all my home brew initrd's tend to do and 2) deliver a payload to the client.

For this it should be able to mount a NFS share and use dd to copy an image from the server to the client. Yes! I know this is asking for trouble, but I'm preparing to mass install an OS on many workstations. So I'm working on building a hands free setup. Just hook up the client, select netboot from the BIOS and wait until the server says it's finished.
Alternatively it may prove useful one day (with some adjustments) to zero disks of discarded machines, something I now do with a 3.5"




I've tried to adjust the Slackware installer initrd to fit this purpose, but it seems either 1) it recognizes the clients hardware but boots into the installer, or 2) it doesn't boot into the installer (goes into bash) but doesn't recognize the clients hardware anymore.

Is there perhaps some more generic initrd that I may use for this purpose? I can adjust images, but I've lost faith in my ability to build one from scratch. That's something a thousand reboots leading to kernel panics does to a man :s

Have you thought about using rsync to push out the image to the clients? Perhaps create a directory with said files from the image, mount that, and use rsync to push the files to the clients. This requires pxe booting each of the clients however.