-Original Message-
From: Patrick J. LoPresti [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Monday, October 25, 2004 10:48 PM
To: Moritz Engel
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: the whole unattended on one cd/dvd!
Moritz Engel [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Hi Pat,
First, thanks for the great work and especially for new release
yesterday!
Don't just thank me! We have a whole crew of developers without whom
many of our best features would not exist.
unattended installation from a CD/DVD if no server is
available. But without
breaking the normal server-based installation process!
The basic idea:
i) changing isolinux.cfg that a prompt will be displayed
and default boot
option is localboot
Yup. Arguably, we could make this the default for our regular CD boot
as well, since people sometimes forget to eject the CD-ROM.
It would be my preferred option, cause I am one of those who sometimes
forget to eject. localboot is the 128 option in isolinux.cfg - it works
very well on all hardware I have tested. Do you know any hardware, where it
wont work? Is there a reason why we dont make it the default?
ii) changing the master script:
- When it asks for the servershare you can also type
something like
/dev/hdd where hdd is your cd-drive.
- If a device is given it will be mounted to z instead of
the servershare
I like this. Eventually we should be able to auto-detect the CD-ROM
(usually), but for an initial pass this sounds fine.
How can I auto-detect? When you load the ide-cd module it auto-detects and
reports the device.
iii) changing mapznrun.bat that it will use the cd-drive
Tricky to get right in general, since it is hard to be certain what
drive letter the CD-ROM device will have (especially if the user is
doing a customized partitioning scheme). But, again, an initial
version to handle the common case (CD-ROM drive is on D:) should be
pretty easy.
A while ago we had a loop in mapznrun.bat to scan the available drive
letters for the installation media. Unfortunately, that broke on some
systems with flash-card readers... If the flash drive is (say) E:,
then as soon as you access E: Windows halts with a dialog box asking
the user to insert media. I mention this just in case you think of
the same clever idea :-).
The first time I thought of it, but I think of the registry like Shad
mentioned in his reply!
What I need to test the changes is an isofs.ko module to mount the
cd. I would be happy if you can send me one, so I dont have to get
all the sources and recompile the whole linuxboot. The needed (for
ide, scsi comes later) ide-cd module is at the share, so I can copy
it manually for testing purposes.
OK, I have uploaded an isofs.ko to
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/testing/.
Do you not also need udf.ko?
Thanks; udf.ko would be good for DVD and for longer filenames and deeper
directory structures.
Besides only some small changes are needed, for example that teh
master-script dies if no dhcp-lease is found.
Perhaps a command-line argument (like dvd) could notify the master
script that it is being booted from DVD and should not attempt to
start the network.
great idea!
Feel free to start sending patches (in small self-contained pieces, if
possible) to unattended-devel so we can look them over.
I can only review them for obvious things because I do not have a
DVD burner. But Shad does...
At first Im using a CD-RW and put only unattended, winxp and perl on it.
When this works Im trying DVD.
If I dont run into severe problems it would be sufficient to provide
a script that unpacks the linuxboot.iso, changes isolinux.cfg and
the master script (if the changes are not already included) and
creates a new isoimage with the install directory included.
I would rather ship a template (unattended-X.X-dvdboot) which people
can download, tweak, then run make on. The requirements for this
would be pretty minor; all it should need is basic Unix utilities
(make etc.) plus mkisofs, right? Or is some other tool needed for
creating a DVD image?
- Pat
--
Moritz
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