I like to answer this question from IRC > lazyb0y> did anybody ever create an initrd for fai that includes features to > get the location of the nfsroot by dhcp and mount the nfsroot > lazyb0y> as opposed to having the kernel features compiled in and do that on > the kernel level?
> h01ger> yes,lots of peoole No, not lots of people. I think only oz, h0lger and I did this for FAI. It works this way: On a machine running a stock Debian kernel 2.6.18 (with etch) edit /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf and change to these lines MODULES=netboot BOOT=nfs then mkinitamfs -o fai-initrd. This creates the initrd for net booting. Copy the the kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-3-686 and fai-initrd to /srv/fai/tftp In pxelinux.cfg/ use this file: label fai-generated kernel vmlinuz-2.6.18-3.686 append initrd=fai-initrd ip=dhcp FAI_CONFIG_SRC=nfs://kueppers/usr/local/share/cs-etch FAI_ACTION=install root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=134.95.9.149:/usr/lib/fai/nfsroot-etch,v2,tcp,rsize=32768,wsize=32768 FAI_FLAGS=verbose,sshd,createvt This boots my Thinkpad T60 without problems where the default FAI kernel does not work. Do not forget to change the initramfs.conf back to is previous version, otherwise the next kernel update will create an initrd which will not boot your machine any more (this happend to me once) or use the option -d. -- regards Thomas