etherboot and FAI

[Thomas Lange]

>>>>> On Mon, 28 Mar 2005 17:24:32 -0700, Jeffrey Stolte <stolte at ucar.edu> said:

    >   However, we now have an older machine that does
    > not support PXE booting.  We were able to the use the rom-o-matic
    > website to generate a boot floppy that works fine.  However, I'm not
    > sure where to set FAI_ACTION and FAI_INSTALL when using this method.
    > The etherboot method does not appear to use the file in /boot/fai/pxelinux.cfg
    > (generated by fai-chboot), understandably, since we're not using PXE.

Using etherboot you can create a boot floppy, that supports PXE and
then you can use fai-chboot to use the default fai method (loading
pxelinux.0 and using pxelinux.cfg) for booting your clients. To use
PXE support in etherboot, you should use the newest version of
etherboot! From the changelog of Etherboot 5.3.14:

PXE is now supported.  You will also need to configure your server to
provide a pxelinux.0 loader file, kernel and initrd images, and a
pxelinux.cfg directory with a appropriate configuration spec files.

I did that once with some old hardware, and it worked great when I
used the new etherboot version (http://rom-o-matic.net/5.3.14/)

P.S:
I'm always very interested in user experiences with FAI. Can you
please fill out the FAI questionnaire
http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/questionnaire
and send it back to me when you finished a project with fai.

-- 
best regards Thomas