Hi, I am working on booting Debian over http, and I faced few problems and I attempted to solve them. Following is the approach I took and the the questions I have. I hope that you will find this work useful.
I have been trying to use "httpfs" option to boot "debian-live-501-i386-gnome-desktop.iso". But I could not locate the httpfs program in initramfs. So I added httpfs and fusermount from http://httpfs.sourceforge.net to /bin of initramfs. With this modifications debian was able to boot from filesystem.squashfs hosted on remote webserver. I also wanted to be able to boot from "debian-live-501-i386-gnome-desktop.iso" in addition to "filesystem.squashfs". I attempted this by modifying "do_httpmount" to recognize ".iso" extension. I mount the iso on "${rootmnt}/iso" this iso is then mounted on "${mountpoint}". Here is the code snippet <code> if [ "${extension}" = "iso" ] then modprobe fuse modprobe loop mkdir -p "${rootmnt}/iso" httpfs "${url}" "${rootmnt}/iso" FILEPATH=`ls "${mountpoint}"/iso/*.iso` mount -t iso9660 $FILEPATH "${mountpoint}" -o loop -o ro return 0 fi </code> I chose the location "${rootmnt}/iso" so that "run-init" will not try to delete it in "nuking initramfs" step. But still I am getting error "run-init: nuking initramfs contents: Directory not empty" I modified and re-compiled "run-init" for not ignoring the failure of nuke_dir("/") and included it in my initramfs. With this ugly hack, I did managed to get past the error, but I got strange error when gnome GUI started. <error> There was an error starting the GNOME Settings Daemon. Some things, such as themes, sounds, or background settings may not work correctly. The last error message was: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken GNOME will still try to restart the Settings Daemon next time you log in. X Close </error> I wanted to know where can I mount the ISO image so that I will not come in the path of nuke_dir. You can find the modified "live" script here http://rom.etherboot.org/share/pravin/BKO/pxeknife/debian/debian-live-501-i386/live and Initramfs is generated from orignal initramfs using following script http://rom.etherboot.org/share/pravin/BKO/pxeknife/debian/debian-live-501-i386/generate_initrd.sh All the files needed to boot debian over http can be located at http://rom.etherboot.org/share/pravin/BKO/pxeknife/debian/ You test the debian booting over http by downloading gpxe from following URL http://rom.etherboot.org/share/pravin/BKO/ It is still under development, and hence may not work properly. Any suggestions and feedback are welcome. -- Pravin -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-live-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
