Specifications

Remote Booting Linux on Intel Processors (CERN Variant)

Concurrent Technologies Page 6 of 30

• “cp /root/syslinux-2.11/pxelinux.0 /tftpboot”

14. The Syslinux boot loader will look for a client’s configuration file in the

“/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg” directory. The LILO style configuration file tells the boot loader,

among other things, where the client’s kernel, and root file system file, if any, is located. A

client’s configuration file name is derived from the client’s IP address, by converting the dot

decimal IP address to its hex equivalent, in this case 192.67.84.171 is the dot decimal address

that converts to 192=C0h, 67=43h, 84=54h and 171=ABh giving the file name C04354AB.

The file name for 192.67.84.172 will be C04354AC. Please read the Syslinux documentation

in “/usr/doc/syslinux-1.72” for further information.

NOTE: As a convenience the following script file will perform the above conversion

automatically, cut and past the following into the file “/usr/bin/dotIP2hex” and “chmod 755

/usr/bin/dotIP2hex”

#!/bin/sh

if [ $# != 1 ]

then

echo Usage: $0 '< IP number in dotted decimal notation i.e. 192.168.0.1'>'

exit 1

echo $1 | awk -F "." '{printf("HexIP=0x%02X%02X%02X%02X\n", $1, $2, $3, $4)}'

15. Create a PXE configuration directory and client configuration file,

• “mkdir /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg”

• Cut And Paste the following and save to the files “/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/C04354AB” and

“/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/C04354AC”

PROMPT 1

TIMEOUT 100

DEFAULT linux

LABEL linux

KERNEL bzImage

APPEND initrd=rootfs.gz root=/dev/ram rw

16. All the server tools and boot image utilities have now been installed and are ready for use.

Reboot. The DHCP, TFTP, and NFS servers will start automatically.

Configuring the Client Kernel

This section outlines the kernel options that are required to make the Client kernel suitable for network

booting.

1. The source for the kernel in not installed as standard, type the following commands to install the

kernel,

• Install the kernel source,

“rpm -ivh $RPMSHOME/kernel-source-2.4.*.i386.rpm”