Greetings fellow Debian Users!
Please bear with me, this is my first post to this forums. I am a long time Redhat user that has decided to abandon that distribution for Debian, which is a bit more open source friendly. I'm using Debian 12.9 and like what I see so far except for this one issue.
I am trying to do something seemingly simple that exists in the Redhat world, but is proving damned near impossible in the Debian world -- I wish to do a network boot and install the media via the network in a completely unattended manner. Here is where I'm running into issues: My network card driver module, which is all libvirt based, doesn't appear to be included in Debian's busybox on either the netboot DVD or the install DVD 1. Only after installation from a DVD or harddrive/flashdrive, will this module become accessible. With that said, I've generated a new busybox initrd with the driver and added a script into the /etc/rcS.d directory to acquire a static reservation via DHCP for the virtual machine. While I could mount a virtual CD, I plan on eventually using this same process to provision on remote bear metal on older gear with no IPMI, so that is not a good option.
It appears the debian version of busybox does not natively support FTP or NFS, so doing FTP or NFS installs seem out of the question. It does, however support TFTP, so I'd be ok doing this if I could figure out how to use it.
So here is the specific problems I'm having: I can PXE boot the kernel and start busybox, obtain an IP address via DHCP, but the installer insists on loading install media via DVD. Ideally I'd like to install via http, nfs or ftp, but I'm not sure how to tell the busybox initrd to look at that media.
One thing I have noticed, busybox doesn't really seem to use many of the kernel parameters, specifically networking ones that I've added to the boot kernel command line. I'm really not sure what to do next. The busyscript script that start things in motion don't seem to allow for other install methods. Maybe I'm just missing something? If I can get a base system down with a preseed and do all that over the network I'd be very happy!
I don't know what to do next. Let me know what y'all think. My brain is fried trying to figure out a solution to all this and I need help from the collective hive mind here.
Please bear with me, this is my first post to this forums. I am a long time Redhat user that has decided to abandon that distribution for Debian, which is a bit more open source friendly. I'm using Debian 12.9 and like what I see so far except for this one issue.
I am trying to do something seemingly simple that exists in the Redhat world, but is proving damned near impossible in the Debian world -- I wish to do a network boot and install the media via the network in a completely unattended manner. Here is where I'm running into issues: My network card driver module, which is all libvirt based, doesn't appear to be included in Debian's busybox on either the netboot DVD or the install DVD 1. Only after installation from a DVD or harddrive/flashdrive, will this module become accessible. With that said, I've generated a new busybox initrd with the driver and added a script into the /etc/rcS.d directory to acquire a static reservation via DHCP for the virtual machine. While I could mount a virtual CD, I plan on eventually using this same process to provision on remote bear metal on older gear with no IPMI, so that is not a good option.
It appears the debian version of busybox does not natively support FTP or NFS, so doing FTP or NFS installs seem out of the question. It does, however support TFTP, so I'd be ok doing this if I could figure out how to use it.
So here is the specific problems I'm having: I can PXE boot the kernel and start busybox, obtain an IP address via DHCP, but the installer insists on loading install media via DVD. Ideally I'd like to install via http, nfs or ftp, but I'm not sure how to tell the busybox initrd to look at that media.
One thing I have noticed, busybox doesn't really seem to use many of the kernel parameters, specifically networking ones that I've added to the boot kernel command line. I'm really not sure what to do next. The busyscript script that start things in motion don't seem to allow for other install methods. Maybe I'm just missing something? If I can get a base system down with a preseed and do all that over the network I'd be very happy!
I don't know what to do next. Let me know what y'all think. My brain is fried trying to figure out a solution to all this and I need help from the collective hive mind here.
Statistics: Posted by Gruic — 2025-03-05 20:51 — Replies 4 — Views 150
