Sunday, May 19, 2013

PXE Installation Notes

I recently discovered my siblings old laptop. Note: this unit is newer than mine, and has a turion 64 processor. Enough said; I can load slack64 and multi-lib this sucker. (Plus my current slack-lappy-server, has a whopping 256mb of ram--wow!--and a celeron, okay i'll just stop i can hear you laughing.)

The only problem is that the newer system has no HD, and no optical drive. What can one do?

Never fear! In 1999 Intel and Systemsoft developed the Pre Execution Boot environment, aka PXE. This makes use of IPv4, DHCP, and a TFTP server.

So, we use a variation of a PXE boot environment to install over the slack14-32 usb environment I previously had, and upgrade it to slack14-64.

Although I've shamelessly (and without permission I might add), have borrowed previous authors material to repost on this blogspace, I will not do so to the awesome contributors of slackware. I believe Eric Hamleers (aka the amazing Alien Bob), is the author of the current Slackware README_PXE.txt file. So, I refer everyone to the aforementioned readme, which can be found in your slackware installation disk, under the /USB-AND-PXE-INSTALLERS directory. (A link is also provided at the end of this post under Sources.)

What I wanted to add is some notes from my experience. Now, I've actually setup this at least.. oh 4-7 times in my life, so I'm already very familiar with the process. If anyone needs any help--feel free to ask me and I'll be happy to comment. Otherwise, join and post your question on LQ.

a. I used the simple setup. Note: this is appropriate for most home /SOHO users. If you have a corp network/ laboratory, or systems that you do NOT want to boot linux, use the advanced setup. The difference in configuring dhcpd.conf is not that great, it simply allows you to define which systems to boot via MAC address.

a1. The readme does not explicitly state this, however my first time took me about a day to figure this simple thing out, so I'll be nice and share.

The sample configuration defines the DHCP & TFTP server as 192.168.0.1. So, when you start dhcpd (after having defined your /etc/dhcpd.conf of course), make sure to:

# bring up the interface you will use to serve pxe, i.e. Duh.

ifconfig eth0 up                           
ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1
dhcpd

And then you should see a response stating dhcp is being served on 192.168.0.0/24.

b. Usually after getting everything setup, I usually just plugged in my ethernet cable from the server system to the target installation system. Although technically you should be using a crossover cable, in my experience with newer gigabit interfaces, the negotiation is handled automatically by the interface firmware. This was not the case in my current setup.I sat dumbfounded as the target system had a big fat no on screen after booting to pxe-boot mode:

Check Interface
Operating System not found

So I was like, wtf? I was about to consider buying a pcmcia gigabit nic, when I remembered I have a 5port asus gigabit switch. I figured, I can connect the server to the switch, check if the port activates, and do the same with the target system. Note: the target system's ethernet lights do NOT work, and neither did the servers activity lights activate, so it was a reasonable assumption to consider that one of the nics was fucked.

However, when I connected each nic to seperate ports on the switch, I finally got activity on the nics (except the target system). I figured, if the switch shows activity, I'll give it a shot. PHY (OSI level 1), troubleshooting is very straightforward, but a necessary step (sometimes).

Boot the target system into PXE-Boot and BAM, I hit jackpot. When this shit works, you'll know right away: you should see your system grap a dhcp lease almost immediately, and you'll be greated by the slackware installation screen:








So if you see this, that means your DHCP and TFTP server is successfully serving, and if you can boot, your kernels and initrd.gz from the installation disk are intact.

Part2

c. Installation via NFS:

Now, in the past I usually opted for samba installation (simply because I had roomates that use windblows and wanted access to my goods), however I've also used http installation (recommended if you have the time), but nfs is pretty damn simple. My error in this configuration was

/mirror/slackware       192.168.0.0/24(ro,sync,insecure,all_squash)


Now, that is the default recommended config. However, I was trying to be fancy. Instead of populating the installation in /mirror/slackware as mentioned above, (say like /mirror/slackware/slackware-14.64), I populated it in /iso and created a soft-link to the dir (ln -s /iso /mirror/slackware/slackware-14.64).

The install did not like this. It kept coming up with errors, and essentially told me to fuck off. I'm know that somewhere in man exports I can determine the option which will facilitate softlinks to work, however instead I just modified exports to the actual mirror dir:

/iso       192.168.0.0/24(ro,sync,insecure,all_squash)


And the installation was off!

Reasons to recommend PXE/TFTP installation:
a. 100mb ethernet interface is much faster than typical CD/DVD rom read speads. (A typical install from DVD takes a while. If you've done this a couple times, you'll be surprised how fast a 100mb install is. A gigabit install is LIGHTNING fast (dont even get me started on fiber channel links, when I have the hardware I will revisit this post). 

b. You can host more than just slackware. In fact, at Intel I used this setup to host our RHEL6 installs. Any Linux can be hosted. In fact--I used a slack pxe/server to host Windows7! This requires configuring pxelinux.cfg/default a little differently than what is included in the installation disk. I remember I had to do this when a friend handed me a semi-new Sony Vaio laptop, which for some reason did NOT want to boot any of the win7 burned iso's I had (probably Sony dicking us with some bullshit firmware hacks). When I have the time, I'll make another post exclusively on Slack PXE serving Windows.

c. For shear practice. Seriously its good for the soul (or masochistic if your not technically inclined, but hey whatever you call it you'll be happy when it works--trust me).

Sources:

1. Slackware USB-AND-PXE-INSTALLERS/README_USB.txt: http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/slackware/slackware64-14.0/usb-and-pxe-installers/README_PXE.TXT

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