Setting up Network installation system

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Username : Date : Action : Comments [ close all ]
phaedrus : 23/11/01 01:54 AM : Incident created -   I have a computer system without a cdrom drive. I am part of a local LAN with several other linux/windows/unix systems that have disk space available. I would like to install Mandrake 8.1 over the network and have a network boot image disk handy. However I can not find information as to the format of the ftp/nfs/et al filesystem that needs to be created. (I have all 3 8.1 public cd's and can mount them on another system to copy the data).
Linegod_7611 : 23/11/01 06:31 AM : Reply received -   Your best bet would be to mount the CD on a Linux box that has FTP available, and make a symbolic link from the '/mnt/cdrom' to a directory under your FTPs 'pub'. It should just then be a case of pointing your network install at your Linux FTP, and using '/pub/Mandrake' as the path. By switching to console during the network install (ALT-F3, F4, etc) you will see if it is picking up the path correctly.
phaedrus : 24/11/01 03:48 AM : More info provided -   Thanks. Found out that I was running into several issues. 1) all the boot disk images do not support large memory modles (I have 1.5GB ram). Which caused intereseting problems. 2) It appears that when you make a mistake with FTP network booting you cannot correct that mistake in the same load. Ie. If you mis-type the location of the stage2 image the script will see that you have a 0 (zero) size image and then mount it as 0 bytes. You'll bomb out but when you type in the correct path, you can't pull the file as the loopback is already mounted. (bad script) 3) Mitsumi SR242S CD-crom (slimline) drives are only good for target practice even though I wasn't using the drive for this system because of problems w/ linux, having it CONNECTED causes numerous hda i/o interrupts which kept stalling the installation even after it started pulling down files. Had to rip the drive out. Arg! Now I have it 'sorta' installed. Now it's fun time w/ LVM. ARGH! definatly NOT enterprise class yet. :(
phaedrus : 24/11/01 03:49 AM : Incident closed -

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