netbooting with 6.0.1

[TurboBee]

Hi, I recently figured out how to get knoppix 5.1.1 to netboot using tutorials I found on the net. I didn't use a knoppix environment to do this, instead I copied the initrd and vmlinuz created by the knoppix terminal server and used it in my own netboot environment with an nfs setup. I tried doing the exact same steps for 6.0.1 but I got errors about loading cloop and a few other things. In the end the most I could get it to do was drop me into an error environment sort of shell. I was wondering if anyone has figured out how to get netboot working with 6.0.1 yet (using their own netboot environment instead of the one supplied by the knoppix live cd).

TurboBee

[TurboBee]

Well, I finally had time to sit down and figure this out. It was actually quite simple. The short answer to my problem is that I had to modify the miniroot.gz I was using to include all of the net drivers from the knoppix cd.

I came to the conclusion after reading this post

http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=23406

The problem in that post is that the bash script assumes you can still mount miniroot with loop, which isn't the case anymore. Instead you need to use gzip and cpio. I found the info to do this at this url here.

http://wiki.openvz.org/Modifying_initrd_image

Basically to extract the image you need to do

gzip -dc miniroot.gz | cpio -id

to compress it after you've loaded the modules into place, you need to use

find ./ | cpio -H newc -o > miniroot
gzip miniroot

Anyway I got all the info from the urls listed above, I just wanted to put it together as an answer to my post since getting knoppix to netboot on your own pxe server isn't the simplest of things to do.

TurboBee