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5. A system configured to be a PXE boot server. This system must be running DHCP
(dynamic host configuration protocol), TFTP (trivial file transfer protocol), and will
need to have a remote file service available (such as NFS - network file system).
7.3 BIOS Settings
When the motherboard is initialized, it locates all option ROMs and executes BIOS code in
each ROM if it is enabled in the BIOS. If PXE is enabled in your motherboard’s BIOS, the
Ammasso option ROM will begin to execute the PXE support. However, each user must
enable PXE boot in the boot menu of your motherboard’s BIOS. See your motherboard
documentation on how to do this. On some motherboards, the users must also adjust the boot
device priority list so that network boot is attempted before booting from other devices such
as the hard disk, CD-ROM, floppy,
etc.
.
The Ammasso 1100 adapter is listed in the BIOS boot list as:
amm_ccore.zrom 5.3.8 (GPL) etherboot.org
Once PXE Boot is enabled, you can create a single system image in one location and have
your remote machine load that image. At boot time, the server will present the following:
Boot from (N)etwork or (Q)uit?
The default, ‘
N
’, is used if nothing on the keyboard is depressed, causing the system to
perform a network boot. If ‘
Q
’ is depressed, the PXE boot code will be disabled and the
system will boot normally.
7.4 Building the RAMDISK
The ramdisk contains programs that are used to help in the start up process. When booting
from hardware disk, these utility programs are built and installed in the traditional manner.
For PXE style environments, extremely small statically bound versions of these have been
created to help keep the size of the ramdisk as small as possible, so as to not inversely affect
load time over the network.
To provide the executables needed in the ramdisk, the version developed by BusyBox
(
http://www.busybox.net
) can be used for most applications. Due to some
integration issues, we use the standard Linux
insmod
from
modutils
or
module-
init-tools
rather than those provided by BusyBox. These versions can be downloaded
from the following web sites:
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/modutils/v2.4/
[for 2.4 kernels]
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/module-init-
tools/
[for 2.6 kernels]
http://busybox.net/downloads/