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View Full Version : Knoppix Network boot from a samba server?



thenexuscode
02-09-2004, 02:52 AM
I've been messing around with booting knoppix over a network. I've had a redhat server pushing out knoppix images, but, I was wondering if there is any way to serve the image off of samba instead of NFS. This would make it possible to server knoppix from an all windows server environment. PXE and TFTP under windows has been tackled by the PXES people. http://pxes.sourceforge.net/howtos/ms_only_environment/index.html I want to use knoppix over pxes because it's cool ;) and it has great hardware recognition.

Thanks,

Collin

thenexuscode
02-11-2004, 01:54 PM
This stuff is all related to the Knoppix Terminal server. When you run the terminal server it runs a TFTP server, a DHCP server and NFS. It also sets up a special boot image that tells computers to “mount this partition over NFS”. When the PXE client connects to the computer it's gets this boot image, and looks for the KNOPPIX compressed file system on the NFS share. My issue is that I can't always run a DHCP server on any old network I like. I'd like to be able to server knoppix images in a diverse server environment. That would mean using smb to host the image, and using samba to access it from Knoppix.

Currently when you set up KTS it creates a pxelinux config with this in it:

DEFAULT vmlinuz
APPEND nfsdir=192.168.0.3:/cdrom nodhcp lang=us ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init
apm=power-off nomce hda=scsi hdb=scsi hdc=scsi hdd=scsi hde=scsi hdf=scsi hdg=scsi
hdh=scsi vga=791 initrd=miniroot.gz quiet wheelmouse desktop=icewm
BOOT_IMAGE=knoppix
TIMEOUT 300

The first parameter is nfsdir=nfshost/place_to_find_image. The rest looks like knoppix parameters and cheat codes. Does anyone know what the nfsdir parameter applies to? Is it a syslinux thing, a knoppix kernel thing? What I would love is to be able to change that to smbdir=hostname:/name_of_share.

I then have the ability to server this on a windows network, or a linux one with no NFS running. For some reason some people do not like running NFS .. I don't quite know why but then again I'm not a systems/network engineer guy.