[Soekris] What about this feature request?

[Ken]

On 9/8/06, David Courtney <blixel at gmail.com> wrote:
> > I guess you haven't used xmodem very much...
> >
> > You could try something like m0n0wall as an experiment,
> > (don't forget to gunzip the .img first though :-)
> > just transfer it via xmodem over a null-modem lead between
> > two PCs and see how far you get before you spend the 10
> > minutes or so following some guide to setup PXE booting...
> >
>
> What I think would useful would be a bootable ISO image you could
> download and burn to CD that would provide a TFTP/DHCP/anonymous
> FTP/NFS ROOT/NFS/SSH environment for you.

We are creating such a thing to distribute with our boxes to
customers. Once its done the ISO will be available for download, it
will be designed with installing linux in mind. However it should be
easily adaptable to bootstrapping any other OS. In addition we will
probably create a VMWare Player image as well so you dont have boot of
CD. Planning on having it done at the end of the month, but only time
will tell.

>
> (I actually started working on this idea about 6 months ago but I
> didn't get very far.)
>
> What I envision would be a bootable CD image (and/or bootable
> thumbdrive image) that would drop you into a full screen ncurses (menu
> driven) console where you could configure the network settings for
> your particular setup.

For our purposes it would probably come preconfigured, just use a
cross over cable between the soekris board and the computer, this is
how I usually PXE load boards, unless its a dedicated PXE network or
VLAN, I found having people turn on  a DHCP server on there existing
network usually leads to problems if they don't know exactly what they
are doing. But different requirements for differrent folks.


-- 
Ken Caruso
ken at ipl31.net
ken at metrix.net

>
> You could have a memory mount point where you could download files to
> memory that would be needed for the installation of the OS onto the
> Soekris.  Like to install Debian, you would download the
> netboot.tar.gz file and unarchive it to the memory mount point and
> make the necessary changes.  (And the downloading of this file could
> be a single menu option within the CD/thumbdrive image.)  Or to
> install OpenBSD, you download the bsd.rd and pxeboot to the memory
> mount point.  (Again, the CD/thumbdrive image could have scripting to
> make downloading those files a simple as a menu selection.)  (And the
> CD/thumbdrive image could even come with the latest version of
> netboot.tar.gz for Debian installs, or bsd.rd and pxeboot for OpenBSD
> installs.  Of course as those versions changed, so too would this
> theoretical CD/thumbdrive image need to change.)
>
> And of course the CD should come with minicom and the serial port
> module enabled (and the USB to Serial port module also) so you could
> get console access to the Soekris box on a virtual terminal.  ALT+F2
> for example.
>
> So basically, with a single downloadable image, you would have
> everything you would need to setup a new Soekris box without making
> any changes to your laptop/desktop system.
>
> I personally think this would be extremely useful.  And if I knew just
> a *little* more, I would have already created it myself.
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