PXE Booting/Debian

From Wiki

• Note: The Debian Wiki article on PXE booting the installer is a good resource for additional information.

Debian is rather easy to netboot. They provide an installer specific to netbooting, which is available here. In specific, you need the kernel and initrd for the installer, which are found below:

• 2.4 kernel:
  • http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/i386/linux
  • http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/i386/initrd.gz
• 2.6 kernel
  • http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/i386/2.6/linux
  • http://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/dists/sarge/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/debian-installer/i386/2.6/initrd.gz

Note: you only need the 2.4 series, or 2.6 series of the kernel, but nothing is stopping you from having both :)

Debian supplies a rather good example of the needed pxelinux.cfg settings, available here and shown below:

label linux
	kernel debian-installer/i386/linux
	append vga=normal initrd=debian-installer/i386/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=9424 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw  --
label expert
	kernel debian-installer/i386/linux
	append DEBCONF_PRIORITY=low vga=normal initrd=debian-installer/i386/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=9424 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw  --
label linux26
	kernel debian-installer/i386/2.6/linux
	append vga=normal initrd=debian-installer/i386/2.6/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=10934 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw  --
label expert26
	kernel debian-installer/i386/2.6/linux
	append DEBCONF_PRIORITY=low vga=normal initrd=debian-installer/i386/2.6/initrd.gz ramdisk_size=10934 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw  --

I placed the linux and initrd.gz files in a subdirectory of my tftproot. It looks something like this:

tftproot/
	debian/
		kernel-2.4
		initrd-2.4.gz
		kernel-2.6
		initrd-2.6.gz

This allows me to seperate out the debian installer from any other netboot setups I may have running. Likewise, the needed (modified) pxelinux.cfg entries are below:

label debian
	kernel debian/linux-2.4
	append vga=normal initrd=debian/initrd-2.4.gz ramdisk_size=9424 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw  --
label debian-expert
	kernel debian/linux
	append DEBCONF_PRIORITY=low vga=normal initrd=debian/initrd-2.4.gz ramdisk_size=9424 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw  --
label debian26
	kernel debian/linux-2.6
	append vga=normal initrd=debian/initrd-2.6.gz ramdisk_size=10934 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw  --
label debian-expert26
	kernel debian/linux-2.6
	append DEBCONF_PRIORITY=low vga=normal initrd=debian/initrd-2.6.gz ramdisk_size=10934 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw  --

From there, you should have a rather familiar debian installer! :)