Discussion on the future of floppies in 5.x and 6.x

[Brooks Davis]

On Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 10:52:08AM +0100, Daniel Lang wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Matthew D. Fuller wrote on Thu, Jan 08, 2004 at 01:58:11AM -0600:
> [..]
> > And, further, some of us don't have (and don't want) CD burners, and even
> > if we had 'em, don't want to burn (no pun intended ;) a CD blank just to
> > install an OS, when we can just (re-)use 2 floppies and do it across the
> > LAN from a local FTP mirror, which is as fast as a CD drive anyway.
> 
> That's no point, as you can use a CD-RW, so no media is wasted.
> Install over LAN is done anyway, as Scott mentioned only the
> basic boot/install-strap is put into the emulated image.
> 
> However, I second the point, that there is recent hardware around
> which cannot have a CD-Drive attached, but a floppy drive, because
> of space constraints.
> 
> On the other hand, I guess such systems are able to boot over
> the network. I'd love to see a integrated boot and installation
> procedure that utilizes PXE (or any other network boot method)
> and advocates it. (In this regard I just love Suns).

PXE installs are fun and easy.  I use them for the no removable media
boxes on our cluster when I need a local install for testing.

The process is roughly (See Alfred's PXE article for details. Just
ignore the kernel mods.):

mount an install cd (assuming /cdrom as mountpoint)
export /cdrom via nfs
point a tftpd server at /cdrom
configure a dhcpd with the necessicary lines to boot from /boot/pxeboot
boot and install (I think you may need to choose to do an nfs install in
  sysinstall, but I'm not 100% sure of that.)

I think it would be really cool if someone would add a feature to
disk 1 to become a PXE install server.  It should be fairly straight
forward other then dealing with sysinstall.

-- Brooks

-- 
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