Net Install without CD or DHCP?



I'm trying to set up a system for net installing of SUSE (specifically
SLES 9).

So far, I have an installation server (http) set up. I can boot from
the first SUSE install CD, point to the http server, and everything gets
sucked down over the network. Beautiful.

The next step is I would like to give users a process for installing
without having to download the first CD image and burning a CD to boot
from. Completely diskless would be way cool, but downloading a floppy
image and booting from a floppy would be OK.

I've been looking at options, and it looks like what I really want to do
is some kind of compromise between the methods I have found.

Completely diskless netboot seems to require a DHCP server, which I'm
not sure I can set up in our environment.

Another option is to create some kind of grub floppy that would kick off
the installation process. But it looks like grub needs to be compiled
with the network driver for the net card in the machine. That makes it
tough to have a single image that will work for any machine.

What's puzzling me is that the grub solution requires a network driver,
and the netboot doesn't. From what I've been able to read, it seems
like the netboot process gets an IP address and the address of a tftp
server from the DHCP server, and then goes to the specified tftp server
and gets everything else it needs.

I keep thinking there has to be a way to skip the DHCP part of that
process, and manually give the machine its own IP address and tell it
where the tftp server is, and let it start the process from there. Or
some way to make grub work without a pre-loaded net driver, since the
tftp process doesn't seem to need one.

Any ideas on how to make this work?
.



Relevant Pages

  • RE: Cant connect in to server!
    ... Cant access remote web workplace from outside server, ... Installing RRAS returned OK ... > address 3389 on the command line and paste the results to the newsgroup. ... > Microsoft CSS Online Newsgroup Support ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • ANNOUNCE: UnixODBC 0.31
    ... UnixODBC provides a toolkit for writing Perl ODBC clients. ... - Installing and Configuring the Bridge Server ... UnixODBC.pm provides Perl programs with a subset of the X/Open ... Bridge Server," below. ...
    (comp.lang.perl.modules)
  • Re: IPSEC question
    ... The important issue is to get the server working properly first without ... I hit the SBS weblog and tried their stuff. ... Microsoft network client: Digitally sign communications: ... 898060 Installing security update MS05-019 or Windows Server 2003 Service ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)
  • Re: sql 2005 ctp install didnt go so well
    ... Mike Epprecht, Microsoft SQL Server MVP ... > Installing: sqlsupport on target: SERVER ...
    (microsoft.public.sqlserver.setup)
  • Re: VPN disconnection
    ... installing the hotfixes, there will be some problems with VPN. ... Therefore if you installed SP2 on the server, ... Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006 or ISA Server 2004 ... 'Microsoft Firewall' service. ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.server.sbs)