[Techtalk] booting a diskless client

[Miriam English]

Hi Maria,

I don't know much about this, so not sure if this is any help, but when 
I first started using Puppy Linux from CD I was curious about how it 
booted. It was quite confusing to me because it made a boot drive in 
RAM, copying from the CD to it, and booting from RAM, so my attempts to 
find it on the hard drive were not turning up anything sensible. I was 
looking in the wrong place. I have a feeling that at some point CD-based 
Puppy swaps its idea of / from the CD to RAM. Perhaps network booting 
does something similar?

Best wishes,

	- Miriam

Maria McKinley wrote:
> Hello there,
> 
> I am trying to boot a machine over the network, and it gets as far as 
> looking for /sbin/init, and then I get a kernel panic.
> 
> I know that it is mounting the root directory, because if I eliminate 
> the directory /sys, it complains that it cannot mount sys. I know that 
> the file init exists in the root directory, and works with the server.
> 
> nina:~# file /tftpboot/oscar/sbin/init
> /tftpboot/oscar/sbin/init: ELF 64-bit LSB executable, x86-64, version 1 
> (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.8, stripped
> 
> nina:~# ls -lh /tftpboot/oscar/sbin/init
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 37K 2008-09-29 13:32 /tftpboot/oscar/sbin/init
> nina:~# ls -lh /sbin/init
> -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 37K 2008-08-12 07:20 /sbin/init
> nina:~#
> 
> I don't understand why it believes that /sbin/init isn't there!
> 
> Any advice would be awesome.
> 
> thanks,
> maria
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> 

-- 
My time wasn't completely wasted last year.
I went on a 940 million kilometer journey.
-----
Website: http://miriam-english.org
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