Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2004 12:18:31 +0100 From: Erik Norgaard <norgaard@locolomo.org> To: allan@stokes.ca Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: sysinstall flakey after PXE booting 5.3 / AMD64 Message-ID: <41A71107.5080307@locolomo.org> In-Reply-To: <54331.142.179.103.195.1101460877.squirrel@142.179.103.195> References: <54331.142.179.103.195.1101460877.squirrel@142.179.103.195>
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allan@stokes.ca wrote:
> I wasn't able to discover much in the "holographic console". That console
> has rm but not ls. It has ifconfig but not netstat. I can cd into /stand
> but hardly any other directory listed in the PATH variable. Next time
> I'll try typing xyzzy to see if more commands materialize.
>
> What seems clear is that sysinstall starts sick and becomes sicker. I've
> repeated this drill several times with consistently depressing results.
>
> Where I'm at now is wondering if I should give up, dig the server out of
> the network closet, and hang a CDROM off the side (hangs head in shame).
> Is sysinstall not yet quite up to the job, or have I missed a few specs of
> magic pixie dust in my loader.conf configuration?
I have been messing with pxeboot lately on i386 though. I don't know
what's on the bootonly iso, but usually there is a memory file system
that is mounted as root containing the binaries. OpenBSD (AFAIK) does
not support (FBSD) memory disks, so if you want to pook around you
better fire up a FBSD.
Some tricks I have learned along the way: It's neat to have init with
your memory disk image also. You can toggle wether init or sysinstall is
started setting init_path in loader.conf. If /etc/rc is not present for
init you will be offered to start a shell, then you can manually try and
debug the system if hardware is causing trouble.
The best documentation for sysinstall is ... the source ... many
variables are not documented, I found some of the variables from the
configuration menu by grepping for the menu items in the source.
sysinstall can read an installation script if it's called install.cfg
and is in / or /stand. It should(?) be posible to set any variable set
in the interactive menu.
The PATH environment variable appears to be hardcoded (install.c):
setenv("PATH", "/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/stand:"
"/mnt2/stand:/mnt2/bin:/mnt2/sbin:/mnt2/usr/bin:/mnt2/usr/sbin", 1);
But, I must admit that sysinstall would not find ifconfig if not in the
same directory as sysinstall itself.
Well, if you need to get work done now, it is probably faster just to
install from CD as usual, but pxeboot is too cool to give up just
because sysinstall is causing troubles :-)
BTW, I have messed arround so much that I eventually decided to
docuement my yet unsuccesfull attempts to install (at least so I can
repeat the process to the same state of lack of success :-).
I don't know if my document is any better than the others you can find
on the net: www.daemonsecurity.com/pxe/
Cheers, Erik
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