[asterisk-users] PXE-bootable diskless Asterix distro?

[Tzafrir Cohen]

On Sun, Dec 23, 2007 at 09:06:17AM +0100, Vincent wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 06:15:22 +0200, Tzafrir Cohen
> <tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com> wrote:
> >Yes. I have a version of our CD that boots from PXE. It took minor
> >changes and rebuilding as a "PXE image", as Debian Live has basic
> >support of that already.  For simplicity I figure you'll be after a
> >system that has everything in the initrd, but this is not the case here.
> >It mounts a network partition to do the rest. We use NFS. CIFS is also
> >supported. 
> 
> Since ultimately the whole system will have to run from the CF card,
> I'm looking for something that can be downloaded from a remote server
> through PXE, and then run entirely from RAM.
> 
> In the mean time, provided the hardware can boot off a Debian Live CD,
> it's fine: I just need to check that the Netvista can run Asterisk and
> the TDM card with good performance before bothering further.

Debian Live has several targets:
* iso: a standard bootable CD image.
* usb-hdd: An image to copy (with dd) to a USB storage device
* net: files for booting the distribution through PXE.

We currently build just the "iso" target on what we ship outside. the
"net" target mostly uses the same tree. And I have a separate PXE
setting here, so I don't need the full tree. 

I think that the contents of the CD could be tweaked to be booted from
PXE with very minimal changes. But I can't think of giving instructions.
All the PXE instructions pages I saw to date assume that $DISTRO is the
only thing you're going to boot from PXE. Creating a PXE boot menu to
allow booting several of them is rather trivial, but not
well-documented.

If you want to try this I can assist you in private mail.

Or you can try to tweak it yourself, using a standard Debian / Ubuntu as
a build system and the config from the CD as a reference.

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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