diary at Telent Netowrks

Two days later, and I'm still using emacs 21, which is longer than#

Tue, 27 Nov 2001 00:37:12 +0000

Two days later, and I'm still using emacs 21, which is longer than I've managed to stand it for on any previous occasion. It might be a goer this time. Additional fluff for the .emacs: (custom-set-variables '(smiley-regexp-alist nil))

Sunday was a do-nothing day, so not worth diarizing about. That you get no diary entry for it has less to do with any such concept of value than it does that the day was punctuated by a bottle of wine and the Channel 4 "100 best films" program. Monday, post-hangover, involved a driving lesson, a timesheet (one step closer to invoicing), a weird Solaris problem, more Alpha assembly and several hours with a guitar and the tablature (courtesy of OLGA) for White Queen. I feel quite unreasonably positive about life just now, which is an improvement on Sunday.

More on last Saturday's work - how to install Debian using a PXE boot» . It turns out to be quite easy if you have another local machine that can do tftp and bootp service. Almost all the work is done on the server

  1. Install tftp-hpa

  2. Install and configure dhcpd. In the clause that describes your clients (subnet, host, group, whatever) you need to say filename "/var/tftp/pxelinux.0";

  3. Get the debian rescue image, loopback mount it, copy the files into /var/tftp

  4. Copy /usr/lib/syslinux/pxelinux.0 into /var/tftp

  5. Copy syslinux.cfg into /var/tftp/pxelinux.cfg/default

  6. gunzip root.bin, loopback mount it, copy an appropriate ethernet driver onto it, umount, zip it up again

  7. Restart whatever services you just edited the config files for.

  8. Boot the client. It should come up with the normal Debian bootstrap thing.

  9. Before you can install kernel + modules, change to the shell (Alt+F2) and insmod your network driver

  10. When you're ready, proceed at your own pace to an installed Debian box

Handy if you have a laptop like mine (no CDROM, floppy is USB and only emulates a legacy floppy at BIOS level, so Linux doesn't see it)

Sorted a bunch of orinoco_plx mail, sent off a new version to David Gibson. No exciting changes, just more PCI IDs that people keep sending me.