Client CD

[Brian K. White]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Walter Vaughan" <wvaughan at steelerubber.com>
To: <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2006 5:45 PM
Subject: Client CD


> We spent a hour or two this afternoon putting together a bootable liveCD 
> based upon Puppy Linux. In the end it's pretty simple, and I guess really 
> good insurance to keep running a box if the OS/HD dies.
>
> Has anyone else put together a Linux CD that they had that was they could 
> just shove into a PC, reboot and it automatically connect to the proper 
> filePro server?
>
> This seems to work pretty good. Kinda like booting a game on my kids PS2.
>
> Anyone have any real life experience doing this already? War stories?
> We'll know more tomorrow when it goes live.

No, but last week I managed to take the 35 meg miniboot.iso from Suse 10.1 
64bit and unpack it onto a $9 64 meg Staples brand usb stick,
manually doctor the isolinux boot files and change to syslinux, and boot up 
and install Suse 10.1 64 bit on a machine with no cd drive or floppy, just a 
3-drive sata raid5 array on the built-in ich7 controller.

I had to manually navigate text menus & dialogs to load the tg3 driver 
(built-in gigabit nic) and I had to know that was the driver I needed, but 
the driver was already on the stick. I merely went to a menu and selected 
it.
I had to navigate other text menus to specify network settings and the url 
to the suse 10.1 9gig retail dvd that I have unpacked and hosted on one of 
my boxes.

But after that the install went the same as if I had popped in the cd or 
dvd. It downloads an 80 meg ramdisk image from the install source and then 
the gui comes up and it's like the regular install to the end.
The unpacked 9gig retail dvd is hosted on a linux box that's on a 5mbit 
upload fiber connection (FIOS) so it was reasonably fast even over the 
internet.
I could have used mirrors.kernel.org or other public suse mirror for a 
slower install and some packages not available if I didn't happen to have my 
own hosted install source somewhere.

There was one small glitch at the end that was easily fixed without leaving 
the safe confines of yast.
It wrote the grub boot block to the usb stick instead of the raid array. 
With the stick inserted (into any usb jack not just the one that was used 
originally btw) it boots up to the installed os. With the stick removed it 
just sat there. But it was easy to fix. Boot up with the stick, which now 
boots to the installed OS not the on-stick install media because of the grub 
boot block that overwrote the syslinux one, and in Yast there is a dialog 
for grub where you can select the correct disk and it writes the grub mbr 
there and after that the box boots normally from it's own drives with the 
stick removed.

This was a dell box we aquired without really wanting to and it only has 2 
5" bays, but I wanted a hot swap raid enclosure which filled both bays, or 
else I almost couldn't use the box at all.
There is also no floppy or ps/2 ports. just usb, nic, sata, and amazingly 
one rs232. The motherboard and case at least allow for a floppy. Some don't 
any more.
I have a usb floppy for my laptop and was about to get a usb dvd. That would 
already be practical now that new boxes are going to be linux. Get one drive 
and keep upgrading that one drive to the latest type of drive instead of 
getting drives in all the servers and having some boxes not be able to read 
the latest install media. But the stick plus the network is even better.

But now that it's figured out I think it's great to be able to install new 
bare boxes from a $9 usb stick that you buy by the fistfull from a coffee 
can sitting next to the cash register at Staples like gum and pens.
It's easier to doctor the contents of the usb stick than burning cd's and 
dvd's too since the files are all sitting on a fat32 filesystem not packed 
up into an iso.
For instance, everything I had to do in the initial text menus could be 
specified as boot prompt arguments. It's trivially easy now to just pop the 
stick into any box windows/linux/freebsd/mac and just edit the syslinux.cfg 
file and try booting from the stick again.
For further instance, then I could take the xml that yast offers to generate 
at the end of the install ("[ ] clone this system for autoyast?") and add 
that to the stick so the whole install is completely automated.
For further instance, it should be possible thanks to the ease of syslinux, 
to put several different systems on a larger stick and have a boot menu that 
lets you choose which one.
ex:
  Install Suse 32bit
  Install Suse 64bit
  Run DamnSmallLinux
  Run RecoverEDGE

That proposed example would still fit on a 128 meg stick which is throw-away 
small these days.

Most of my boxes have no need for the cd drive except install and crash 
recovery.
My next thing is to take a backupedge bootable restore iso and see if that 
works when converted to a stick too but I was never planning on installing 
backupedge for this particular box anyway so it ok that I don't have that 
working already.

I got the method from descriptions of how to put knoppix onto a usb stick. 
It turns out to be pretty easy. You can do it all from windows in a few 
minutes with winrar and syslinux and of course from linux using native tools 
to unpack the iso and syslinux to write the new mbr. The total number of 
manual steps is pretty short and easy. A 1gig stick that hold the entire CD1 
should be even easier to use for minimal installs since you won't have to 
load nic drivers or enter networking and install url info.
The miniboot.iso is only about 30 to 35 megs so this is perfect for all 
those freebie promotional sticks that are too small to be good for much.

I _think_ the only reason it's so easy is because most cd's happen to use 
isolinux for the bootloader and isolinux is just like syslinux & pxelinux 
all being made by the same guy.
If there are any other iso boot loaders for linux besides isolinux, I don't 
know how easy it would be to convert them to syslinux.

I need to write this up on the install methods page on the opensuse wiki 
because it's not described there and I think it's way cool.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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