Re: [Unattended] Similar project - merging possible?
Patrick J. LoPresti wrote: Hagen Muench [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: This would really be nice. One time, we tried out to boot from memory stick. We didn't solved this problem yet. I have read you need a fairly sophisticated BIOS, and that such BIOSes are often buggy. But it would be fun to try just the same. O yes, I remeber this when we started the project using a dos disk with emm and USB floppy drives... | With all the possible network and hard disk drivers, I think it is | important for any Linux-based approach to use a modular kernel and to | separate the initial boot disk from the driver modules disk, much | like any Linux installer does. It's already a plan to modularize it. Well, I am getting interested enough that I plan to play with it this weekend. The 2.6 kernel seems to have some facilities which simply autodetecting hardware and loading drivers (e.g., sysfs, improved hotplug/coldplug infrastructure). I am still doing research, though. Maybe gentoo linux is a good place to get some hints... I think they already use this feature on their install disks. At the beginnig of 2002 we tried out the dosemu stuff. But dosemu couldn't start the winnt.exe. This was an issue at this time. Maybe this is fixed yet (does anybody knows?). It was fixed during the summer of 2002: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?m=102765548220451 (Read the thread for details... The fixes made it into the Linux kernel and dosemu shortly thereafter.) That's great! Installing Windows with only one reboot ;) I will play with this next weekend... Between Linux, dosemu, and FreeDOS, I believe we can provide a completely free infrastructure for installing Windows, which is a very pleasing concept :-). - Pat I agree completely! Till -- - Substring GmbH Tscharnerstrasse 39a CH-3007 Bern Tel. ++41 (0)31 382 51 12 Fax. ++41 (0)31 382 51 87 http://www.substring.ch SMS via http://www.substring.ch/sms.php?sendto=twimmer --- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn ___ unattended-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
Re: [Unattended] Similar project - merging possible?
Hagen Muench [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: This would really be nice. One time, we tried out to boot from memory stick. We didn't solved this problem yet. I have read you need a fairly sophisticated BIOS, and that such BIOSes are often buggy. But it would be fun to try just the same. | With all the possible network and hard disk drivers, I think it is | important for any Linux-based approach to use a modular kernel and to | separate the initial boot disk from the driver modules disk, much | like any Linux installer does. It's already a plan to modularize it. Well, I am getting interested enough that I plan to play with it this weekend. The 2.6 kernel seems to have some facilities which simply autodetecting hardware and loading drivers (e.g., sysfs, improved hotplug/coldplug infrastructure). I am still doing research, though. At the beginnig of 2002 we tried out the dosemu stuff. But dosemu couldn't start the winnt.exe. This was an issue at this time. Maybe this is fixed yet (does anybody knows?). It was fixed during the summer of 2002: http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?m=102765548220451 (Read the thread for details... The fixes made it into the Linux kernel and dosemu shortly thereafter.) Between Linux, dosemu, and FreeDOS, I believe we can provide a completely free infrastructure for installing Windows, which is a very pleasing concept :-). - Pat --- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn ___ unattended-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
Re: [Unattended] Similar project - merging possible?
Patrick J. LoPresti wrote: Between Linux, dosemu, and FreeDOS, I believe we can provide a completely free infrastructure for installing Windows, which is a very pleasing concept :-). The one big question mark that I have with this approach is hardware RAID cards. We have /several/ that 1) don't have linux drivers or 2) have really old linux drivers that only work on outdated kernels. I've been installing windows onto these boxes with unattended just fine. You do the txtsetup.oem dance, and you are good to go, since dos is just using BIOS to talk to the disk (as I understand it). Then I tried kickstarting RH9 onto these boxes (we are using them in a multiboot setup, with 2 windows partitions, and one linux partition). I did finally get the driver module wedged into the kickstart boot disks, but I am stuck running an older kernel, because these (binary-only) drivers are only provided for that one. So, if you do decide to go to an only Linux setup, one thing to keep in mind are these RAID drivers, and how you will be able to add them to the linux boot disk. Jordan --- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn ___ unattended-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
RE: [Unattended] Similar project - merging possible?
Yes, there are several default options and custom options can be added as well. The list of default options can be found here: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/technet/prodtechn ol/windows2000serv/reskit/tcpip/part4/tcpappe.asp. Tyler Cool! Does anybody know if Microsoft's DHCP server can be configured with custom options? (We can always fall back to the current prompt the user with timeout approach if the DHCP options are not available.) --- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn ___ unattended-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
Re: [Unattended] Similar project - merging possible?
Alexander Schuppisser [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: We are developing a similar open-source project for large networks which is still somewhat different to your approach. We are thinking about a merge with unattended, but we don't know, if this is A) welcomed and B) how our sources are incorporatable to your concept... I cannot answer (B) without seeing your sources. But as for (A), a Linux boot disk has been on our it would be nice list for a long time. It has come up on this mailing list before, and I am definitely interested. To recap, the major advantages of a Linux boot disk are: - No need to reboot after partitioning. - Access to more information for deciding what to do; e.g., DHCP options, SMBIOS data (like Dell service tag), and information gathered via HTTP. - No more issues with DOS junk like silly memory management and broken BIOSes. (Perhaps I should add wireless network support. Imagine a laptop with only a wireless card and a USB port; but no Ethernet, no floppy, and no CD. Imagine booting that laptop from a USB flash memory stick and installing Windows over the wireless. How cool would that be?) Here is how we do the things: we boot with a linux bootfloppy which consists of a trimmed kernel with support for a lot of diffrent NICs (so no need for different floppy-images). Nice! But there are a lot of NICs, so it is important that the end-user be able to add (or download) support for their own. Also, the network card is not the only problem... You have to worry about SCSI and RAID drivers, too. This is the biggest advantage of the DOS-based boot disk; it supports any hard drive controller automatically. And if you boot using PXE, it supports any network controller automatically, too, with a single floppy image. With all the possible network and hard disk drivers, I think it is important for any Linux-based approach to use a modular kernel and to separate the initial boot disk from the driver modules disk, much like any Linux installer does. The floppy contains also busy-box, a dhcp-client and samba(!) plus NFS-Support. After booting, a ash-shellscript gets started. The floppy gets its settings (namely the Win-share location and other relevant infos) from custom DHCP-Options from the DHCP-Server. Cool! Does anybody know if Microsoft's DHCP server can be configured with custom options? (We can always fall back to the current prompt the user with timeout approach if the DHCP options are not available.) From this point on, a (configurable) perl-script from the share takes over: The HD gets patrtitioned and FAT-formated. The win-setup-files are downloaded and stored to HD on the right partition. The HD gets prepared with syslinux as bootloader to start DOS to start Winnt.exe for the next reboot. The system will be then rebooted. This ends up copying each file three times: Once within Linux to populate the share, once by winnt.exe, and once by Windows Setup itself after winnt.exe reboots. I would rather run winnt.exe using dosemu from within Linux. So you would not need to copy the setup files nor the boot sector; you would just boot dosemu and let winnt.exe do that work (via lredir). After the windows installation, another perl-script gets startet by perl for windows. Perl for windows was installed during the installation of windows via the commandline.txt. This script then performs other tasks like joining-to-a-domain, installing winword and other packages, mailing the outcome of the installation etc. We already have a structure in place for this part. But contributions are always welcome! The advantage of this approach is that there is no need to configure the bootdisk and also no need of user-interaction during the whole setup-procedure. The bootdisk is formated as FAT. If special settings are needed, they therefore can be set under Windows in the Config-files on the floppy or better on the central perl-script on the fileserver. It would be nice to have the option of answering configuration questions on the server instead of on the client during installation. But this is really a separate issue from using Linux on the boot disk. Even the DOS boot disk runs Perl. Ufff.. All that explained, what kind of possibilities do you see for this project to contribute to unattended, maybe also as a second lag? Is all of this code already written? Can I look at it? I care about backwards compatibility with our existing system, so we are not going to gut it completely. But even if we end up having separate projects, we can certainly share some pieces, especially the boot disk. The first step, in my view, is to get our existing system working with a Linux boot disk. The only hard part here, really, is dealing with drivers. How would you feel about working together on a modular Linux-based boot disk? We can worry later about whether you should integrate the rest of your stuff or spawn your own project. (A good boot disk
RE: [Unattended] Similar project - merging possible?
The floppy contains also busy-box, a dhcp-client and samba(!) plus NFS-Support. After booting, a ash-shellscript gets started. The floppy gets its settings (namely the Win-share location and other relevant infos) from custom DHCP-Options from the DHCP-Server. Cool! Does anybody know if Microsoft's DHCP server can be configured with custom options? (We can always fall back to the current prompt the user with timeout approach if the DHCP options are not available.) If I understand what you mean by 'custom options' the yes. I have added them. Brad --- The SF.Net email is sponsored by EclipseCon 2004 Premiere Conference on Open Tools Development and Integration See the breadth of Eclipse activity. February 3-5 in Anaheim, CA. http://www.eclipsecon.org/osdn ___ unattended-info mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unattended-info
