Fedora Core 3 (Linux) Installation PXE

Net Install FC3

Fedora Core 3 (Linux) Installation: Services [DHCP]

Setting up Fedora Core 3 on the Soekris is relatively easy. Unfortunately, the defaults for the grub.conf make it impossible to use after it reboots for the first time. By default, grub.conf has a splash image set which apparently causes the boot process to hang. I was able to rectify the problem by booting the Soekris via NFS, mounting the fedora boot partition, modifying the /boot/grub/grub.conf file and simply comment out the offending line. That was all it took to fix it. But I still give this distro a BIG THUMBS DOWN for use with the Soekris for that reason alone.

But besides the problem with the grub.conf setting that prevents the box from rebooting, the distro is very bulky and even the ASCII/text based installer is slow to respond. Even if you trim down the installation options as much as possible (without doing individual package selection), it still uses 600MB. You could probably squeeze it down even more if you actually sit and wait 10 to 15 minutes while the installer loads the individual package list so you can trim out the fat, but with so many other distros available that are better suited for the Soekris, why bother?

Never the less, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, so I've gone ahead and documented the process in case someone is bent on running FC3 on their Soekris. And if anyone knows a way to edit the grub.conf file before the installer reboots itself, and let me know. Otherwise I think this distro is a complete waste of time for use with the Soekris. NFS booting it just to edit that single file is a huge pain in the neck and most people aren't going to bother.

My notes here are an attempt to condense all the information I have obtained so that people have a simple, single source of information that applies specifically to the Soekris net4801.

You don't have to have an existing Fedora Core 3 installation to install FC3 on your Soekris. Any Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris box should do just fine. (I imagine you could even use Mac OSX?) In this example, I will be installing FC3 onto my Soekris machine using Gentoo Linux as the host.

The first thing that happens when you boot your Soekris box from the network is that it will look for a DHCP server. That being the case, configuring the DHCP server is the first thing you should set up and get working.

If you don't already have a DHCP server running, you need to install it now. In this document, I am using Gentoo Linux as the host machine for installing FC3. With Gentoo, use emerge to install a DHCP server.

emerge dhcp

Once complete, edit the /etc/dhcp/dhcp.conf file. By default, this file will not exist after a new DHCP install using emerge. There is a /etc/dhcp/dhcp.conf.example file but most likely you can just use my information to setup your config file. Here is my config file.

allow booting;
allow bootp;
option domain-name "example.com";
option domain-name-servers 192.168.1.1 ;
option routers 192.168.1.1;

default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;

ddns-update-style none;

log-facility local7;

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
}

host debbox {
  hardware ethernet 00:00:00:00:00:00;
  fixed-address 192.168.1.4;
  next-server 192.168.1.2;
  option root-path "/tftpboot";
  filename "/soekpxe.0";
}

Obviously you will have to make the necessary MAC and IP address changes to match your particular setup. If you don't know the MAC address of your Eth0 network interface, section of this document as it explains how to find it.

Make sure the IP address for the next-server directive is the IP address for your TFTP server. This directive is optional, however it is often needed even if your TFTP server is running on the same machine as your DHCP server. And I haven't ran into any problems having the next-server directive in place even it when it wasn't needed.

Now you should start the DHCP server.

/etc/init.d/dhcp start

If you want your dhcp daemon to run all the time, you should make it part of your boot process.

rc-update add dhcp default

This is worth repeating: running daemons (services) is a security risk. Every daemon running on your system is a potential "back door" into your system. I would advise against running the daemon full time unless you absolutely have to. However, if that is the case, I would recommend setting up some IP and port filtering rules to minimize access to the daemon.

STOP NOW: Before you continue with TFTP setup, you should make absolutely certain your DHCP server is working. Until your DHCP server is working properly, everything else is a complete waste of time.

You can verify that your DHCP server is working by going to your Soekris box and typing boot f0 at the comBIOS. The process will of course fail after a point because we haven't set up the other necessary things yet, but you should clearly see the IP address printed on the screen. However, you must make absolutely certain that your Soekris box is pulling the IP address from your newly configured DHCP server and NOT from an existing DHCP server on your network.

For example, if you have an existing Linksys/Netgear DHCP server on your network, your Soekris box might get its IP address from the wrong DHCP server. If that happens, your Soekris will never get past this point because it will never contact the TFTP server.

If you have multiple DHCP servers on your network, you will have to either disable the old one at least until your Soekris box gets its IP address from the proper server, or you will have to physically move your Soekris box and new DHCP server to another network.

On my own network, I have my primary day-to-day DHCP server configured so that it ignores MAC addresses that I haven't explicity entered in. So my Soekris box has no problem getting an IP address from the correct DHCP server because my other DHCP server simply ignores my Soekris box when it requests an IP address.

Again. Make certain your Soekris is getting an IP address from the correct DHCP server before you move on or else you are just going to be banging your head into the wall in frustration.

Fedora Core 3 (Linux) Installation: Services [TFTP]

The next thing to do is enable TFTP. TFTP is part of the base installation for FreeBSD and OpenBSD. But if you are using Linux as the host machine, you will have to install tftp if it wasn't part of your distribution. Gentoo users can simply use emerge.

emerge tftp-hpa

Once tftp-hpa is installed, look at your /etc/conf.d/in.tftpd file. It will look something like this:

# Config file for /etc/init.d/in.tftpd
# Remove the -l if you use [x]inetd

INTFTPD_PATH="/tftpboot"
INTFTPD_OPTS="-l -s ${INTFTPD_PATH}"

Make note of the INTFTPD_PATH entry above. In my example, it is /tftpboot. Either change your /etc/conf.d/in.tftpd so that it also says /tftpboot or write down what it says instead as you will need that next.

Now, create a directory on your file system that matches the INTFTPD_PATH entry.

mkdir /tftpboot.

Next, go to the and choose the the best download mirror for your area. Then download initrd.img and vmlinuz from the /pub/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os/images/pxeboot directory. Save those files to /tftpboot

The download site for Fedora doesn't have a pxelinux.0 so you will need to download it at . Save the file to your home directory (or somewhere else), extract the file, and then copy (or move) it to /tftpboot. I recommend renaming it.

gunzip /home/user/pxelinux.0.gz
mv /home/user/pxelinux.0 /tftpboot/soekpxe.0

Now you have to create a configuration file that tells Linux how to boot.

mkdir /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg

Now create a file called default inside of /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg. We only need a few lines inside this file. They are as follows:

DEFAULT soekris
SERIAL 0 9600

label soekris
  kernel vmlinuz
  append vga=normal initrd=initrd.img ramdisk_size=9372 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw text console=ttyS0,9600n81 --

You should now start your tftpd daemon.

/etc/init.d/in.tftpd start

If you want your tftpd daemon to run all the time, you should make it part of your boot process.

rc-update add in.tftpd default

Running daemons (services) is a security risk. Every daemon running on your system is a potential "back door" into your system. I would advise against running the daemon full time unless you absolutely have to. However, if that is the case, I would recommend setting up some IP and port filtering rules to minimize access to the daemon.

Fedora Core 3 (Linux) Installation: Installing Fedore Core 3

Everything should be in place now. Reboot your Soekrix box, type boot f0 at the comBIOS to boot from the Network and then you should see something like this.

> boot f0

NSC DP83815/DP83816 Fast Ethernet UNDI, v1.03                                  
Copyright (C) 2002, 2003 National Semiconductor Corporation
All rights reserved.

Pre-boot eXecution Environment  PXE-2.0 (build 082)
Copyright (C) 1997-2000  Intel Corporation


CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 00 24 C3 5E 50
CLIENT IP: 192.168.1.4  MASK: 255.255.255.0  DHCP IP: 192.168.1.10
PXELINUX 2.06 0x3fb30aea  Copyright (C) 1994-2003 H. Peter Anvin
Loading vmlinuz..........................
Loading initrd.img....................................................
Ready.
Linux version 2.6.9-1.667 ([e-mail]) (gcc version 3.4.2 20041017 (Red Hat 3.4.2-6.fc3)) #1 Tue Nov 2 14:41:31 EST 2004
BIOS-provided physical RAM map:
 BIOS-e820: 0000000000000000 - 000000000009fc00 (usable)
 BIOS-e820: 000000000009fc00 - 00000000000a0000 (reserved)
 BIOS-e820: 00000000000f0000 - 0000000000100000 (reserved)
 BIOS-e820: 0000000000100000 - 0000000008000000 (usable)
 BIOS-e820: 00000000fff00000 - 0000000100000000 (reserved)
0MB HIGHMEM available.
128MB LOWMEM available.
zapping low mappings.
DMI not present.
ACPI: Unable to locate RSDP
Built 1 zonelists
Kernel command line: vga=normal initrd=initrd.img ramdisk_size=9372 root=/dev/rd/0 devfs=mount,dall rw console=ttyS0,9600n81 -- BOOT_IMAGE=vmlinuz 
Initializing CPU#0
CPU 0 irqstacks, hard=c03de000 soft=c03dd000
PID hash table entries: 1024 (order: 10, 16384 bytes)
Detected 266.663 MHz processor.
Using tsc for high-res timesource
Console: colour dummy device 80x25
Dentry cache hash table entries: 32768 (order: 5, 131072 bytes)
Inode-cache hash table entries: 16384 (order: 4, 65536 bytes)
Memory: 122796k/131072k available (2096k kernel code, 7788k reserved, 654k data, 144k init, 0k highmem)
Checking if this processor honours the WP bit even in supervisor mode... Ok.
Security Scaffold v1.0.0 initialized
SELinux:  Initializing.
SELinux:  Starting in permissive mode
There is already a security framework initialized, register_security failed.
selinux_register_security:  Registering secondary module capability
Capability LSM initialized as secondary
Mount-cache hash table entries: 512 (order: 0, 4096 bytes)
CPU: NSC Unknown stepping 01
Checking 'hlt' instruction... OK.
checking if image is initramfs...it isn't (no cpio magic); looks like an initrd
Freeing initrd memory: 3151k freed
NET: Registered protocol family 16
PCI: PCI BIOS revision 2.00 entry at 0xf7861, last bus=0
PCI: Using configuration type 1
mtrr: v2.0 (20020519)
ACPI: Subsystem revision 20040816
ACPI: Interpreter disabled.
Linux Plug and Play Support v0.97 (c) Adam Belay
usbcore: registered new driver usbfs
usbcore: registered new driver hub
PCI: Probing PCI hardware
PCI: Probing PCI hardware (bus 00)
apm: BIOS not found.
audit: initializing netlink socket (disabled)
audit(1108520803.658:0): initialized
Total HugeTLB memory allocated, 0
VFS: Disk quotas dquot_6.5.1
Dquot-cache hash table entries: 1024 (order 0, 4096 bytes)
SELinux:  Registering netfilter hooks
Initializing Cryptographic API
ksign: Installing public key data
Loading keyring
- Added public key 809E56CC6E860926
- User ID: Red Hat, Inc. (Kernel Module GPG key)
pci_hotplug: PCI Hot Plug PCI Core version: 0.5
vesafb: probe of vesafb0 failed with error -6
isapnp: Scanning for PnP cards...
isapnp: No Plug & Play device found
Real Time Clock Driver v1.12
Linux agpgart interface v0.100 (c) Dave Jones
i8042.c: Can't read CTR while initializing i8042.
Serial: 8250/16550 driver $Revision: 1.90 $ 8 ports, IRQ sharing enabled
每ttyS0 at I/O 0x3f8 (irq = 4) is a 16550A
ttyS1 at I/O 0x2f8 (irq = 3) is a 16550A
RAMDISK driver initialized: 16 RAM disks of 9372K size 1024 blocksize
Uniform Multi-Platform E-IDE driver Revision: 7.00alpha2
ide: Assuming 33MHz system bus speed for PIO modes; override with idebus=xx
hda: TOSHIBA MK4309MAT, ATA DISK drive
Using cfq io scheduler
ide0 at 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6 on irq 14
hda: max request size: 128KiB
hda: 8452080 sectors (4327 MB), CHS=8944/15/63
 hda: hda1 hda2 hda3
ide-floppy driver 0.99.newide
usbcore: registered new driver hiddev
usbcore: registered new driver usbhid
drivers/usb/input/hid-core.c: v2.0:USB HID core driver
mice: PS/2 mouse device common for all mice
md: md driver 0.90.0 MAX_MD_DEVS=256, MD_SB_DISKS=27
NET: Registered protocol family 2
IP: routing cache hash table of 256 buckets, 8Kbytes
TCP: Hash tables configured (established 8192 bind 2340)
Initializing IPsec netlink socket
NET: Registered protocol family 1
NET: Registered protocol family 17
md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
md: autorun ...
md: ... autorun DONE.
RAMDISK: Compressed image found at block 0
VFS: Mounted root (ext2 filesystem).
Greetings.
anaconda installer init version 10.1.0.2 starting
mounting /proc filesystem... done
mounting /dev/pts (unix98 pty) filesystem... done
mounting /sys filesystem... done
anaconda installer init version 10.1.0.2 using a serial console
remember, cereal is an important part of a nutritionally balanced breakfast.

trying to remount root filesystem read write... done
mounting /tmp as ramfs... done
running install...
running /sbin/loader
G 

Note: The boot process pauses for about 40 seconds at this point. I'm not sure exactly what it's doing, but just be patient.

Within a minute, you should see an ASCII version of the installer come up.

If you install from the Internet, you might get a little confused when prompted for the FTP/HTTP directory. The directory path should be something like /pub/fedora/linux/core/3/i386/os. Here is again.

The installer hesitates for a couple of minutes while it figures out there is no keyboard, mouse, or video card. Be patient.

Running anaconda, the Fedora Core system installer - please wait...
Probing for video card:   Unable to probe
Probing for monitor type:   Unknown monitor
Probing for mouse type:   No - mouse
No video hardware found, assuming headless
Graphical installation not available...  Starting text mode.

Make SURE you set console=ttyS0,9600n81 when the Boot Loader Configuration screen comes up.

Wow. Even with absolutely everything unselected, the installer still says it will take 600MB! Definitely not a light weight.

The installer never reports a problem, but after the system reboots, I don't see anything more even though I set the console parameter during the install to use the serial port. I try pinging the IP address that I statically assign to the box but it never responds. I don't enable the firewall so if the system was coming back up, I should at lest be able to ping it. The problem appears to be that the boot loader hangs because grub.conf defaults to loading a splash image.