Tiny Core Linux
Tiny Core Base => TCB Talk => Topic started by: cast-fish on March 13, 2015, 11:51:13 AM
-
Hello,
your wiki and info pages show examples of how to boot a diskless machine
from another sister machine in your home. Booting over LAN
after reading this is there something i am doing wrong?
does this method require a null modem cable?
thanks
V
-
How would we know if you are doing something wrong?
Null modem cable? What are you talking about?
You do have a PXE enabled X86, correct?
-
uh Gerald....i am unsure
after reading the wiki went about trying to follow it...
the diskless laptop has the first boot device as "NIC" but the bios does not mention PXE anywhere...
The mother machine had that "terminal server" running and i followed all the defaults and linked the 2 machines to each other with a LAN cable
should each machine have it's own cable?.....cable A going from laptop to the router's first Lan socket (1)...
cable B from going the mother machine to the router's second LAN socket? (2)....?
i only followed the wiki as far as 2 pages...i did not believe further reading of PXE was needed......
V
-
You have not provided any useful information.
The first part of the netboot article describes booting one Core machine using another Core machine as the server.
The "The following sections assume that you have working servers" section concerns more advanced PXE boot options that require a working PXE system
( Not necessarily Core based ).
-
Yes Gerald
it's the first sectiojn i followed....booting a machine from a mother machine...i was reading those pages
about twice...it seemed simple and no further reading was needed beyond that
the diskless laptop indeed is fully PXE compliant....but i don't want a red herring here
i simply was trying to boot a diskless laptop..... from another TCL machine in the room...(i am unsure if PXE applies to that)
V
-
PXE boot is clearly stated more than once in that article.
Not all machines are auto-sensing on the NIC.
The safest way to connect them is with separate cables and a switch not connected to your local network.
If you connect them to your local network, your network's dhcp server will interfere with the PXE boot function, as it will not pass a correct 'next server' value.
-
hi
right....it's more complex than i thought to boot a diskless machine from another machine
in the room.
I don't know how to set up servers....and that hidden sentence in the intro of the wiki page missed me..
(then we set up pxelinux servers a tftp servers). it just later assumes that you know how to do that server
set up
i can see now the wiki is involved....is it really that involved to do the booting?
i see in the forum that somebody wrote how to build a TCL with pxe booting....
i mean is there a simple way to do this booting ONE diskless laptop from a spare TCL machine?
V
-
Connect the two machines.
Boot the server.
Start the ControlPanel.
Use the Network button to assign a static IP.
Use the Terminal Server button to configure the PXE server.
Boot the client.
-
right Gerald
that sounds simple enough...it makes sense.
will give that a go here...
thanks then
V
-
1) connected the two machines to each other uising a single LAN cable....cat 5
2) opened NETWORK from control panel on the server machine... and put the static IP of 192.168.0.30
3) applied it
4) opened Network Server on the server machine and followed the steps accepting defaults
5) left terminal open
6) booted client machine
nothing
PXE exiting failed...failed boot media check cable (thats the error message)
maybe this particular example laptop isn't good at pxe....but the other diskless Laptop (the laptop needing netbooting).... that laptop seems to be better at PXE booting and broadcasts for a Dhcp etc....so i will try that laptop
V
-
Older laptops may not work directly connected with a standard network cable. Use 2 cables and a dedicated switch.
-
Unless you use a crossover cable between the two PCs, that setup shouldn't work. Connect both PCs to a switch or hub and you'll stand a better chance.
-
yes sorry....my OP meant "crossoer cable" ...i am 45 see...and back in the days
there was a similar cable called a "null modem cable".....which i made at work
for a friend ...
THe NM Cable was used to link to x86 PC's that were running the same flight simulator program on each
((( 3D war game. )))
The players then flew jet fighters against each other..... each player sitting at their own PC...
(that was back in 1997)
since then we now have online gaming right?.......and PS4....gazillion right
will try to get hold of a cross over cable etc
thx
V
-
I understand that 2 machines can be connected directly, without a router or switch, with a 'crossover' cable (where pair s 2 & 3 have their respective wires switched) -but the first and self booting machine would have to be manually told what ip address it has, and be setup as a server; the other would be told it's address by the first machine.
The second machine would boot if it has a boot by 'pxe' setting in bios; my older machines listed 'lan' boot, but this would need a rom chip with a boot program on it (which is different from the motherboard bios). I played with this in the past,but never got it working.
If you use a switch or router, then regular cat5 cables would be used. The router would need to have the dhcp disabled -as it would interfere with the Tinycore server. There is a way to have the router with the default dhcp server on -the Tinycore server would probably use, instead, the dmasq application setup and running as a proxy-dhcp. (been reading to do this, but never did this).
Hope this is more correct than misleading.
-
yes thanks for that....
i tried TWO cat 5 cables (one from each machine) into the router...but like you say, the router dchp must be dissabled...(i did not do that or know how to)
i tried the whole process from the earlier posts here...while using these two cables ...but the netbooting did not work right
yes, the laptop needing netboot does have proper pxe...it looks particularly
good in it's design for pxe..
i have never messed with my router but it is not bad (livebox 92be) the router also has a usb socket which may be for sending programs from pen drive into it's chips
v
-
I don't know the Livebox, but most modems/routers have a builtin web server used to configure the device. Find the dhcp server or default gateway on a working PC and plug that IP address (192.168.0.1?) in the address bar of your favorite browser.
-
for the livebox, the default is 192.168.1.1 with username/password admin/admin
-
Hello
THat is a great help Juanto and Newuser.
I will follow that advice.
The router here is about 8 years old. It was handed out new when i opened a DSL contract with Orange. I have been with that same company ever since on DSL until a recent discovery changed things for me.
Essentially i have several routers here from different company's.
Some routers are from British Telecom,
some routers are from Orange(now called "EE")
ALso i got a new router off ebay. It was clearly brand new and boxed but never ever worked. Inside it there was a manually inserted micro chip which was missing. I can only assume that these routers were factory errors. For a new router like that, It was extremely cheap to buy.....so
I hope to be able to get this tinycore "netboot" idea working using a sister tinycore machine.
It is just useful to know and helps when dealing with old computers and such like (or thin clients)
Thx
V
-
PXE booting is based on DHCP and TFTP. If your home router is your home DHCP server then it won't provide the name and address of the TFTP server that will have the PXE image that the system you want to boot over the net so nothing will happen. You must turn off DHCP on your home router and set up your own DHCP server that will you can configure with the name and address of the TFTP server that has the PXE image. Usually these two are on the same system, but they don't have to be. Then put the pxelinux.0 file in the root of the TFTP server directory and make sure a pxelinux.cfg directory is in there. There you'll need a default file that looks something like this (change the directories and file names for your configuration):
DEFAULT pxe
LABEL pxe
KERNEL pxelinux.cfg/default-boot/vmlinuz
INITRD pxelinux.cfg/default-boot/core.gz,pxelinux.cfg/default-boot/mydata.gz
APPEND quiet noswap tce=/ httplist=192.168.1.1:/pxeboot.lst
As you can see you will also need an HTTP server (I use lighttpd) to serve up the list of tcz extensions and the extensions themselves.
I'm using this method now to boot multiple VM's in an ESX environment and I've used it in the past in the real world too.
-
I suggest that instead of loading all your extensions using http ( it was not designed for that ), you use an NFS share for your tce directory.
-
But then I'd need a NFS server and presumably a persistent connection. I don't have a problem with the NFS server per se, but I don't want a persistent connection. Once the VM boots I want it to be self sufficient and not depend on another server full time.
-
Either it requires a network connection or it doesn't.
If you are going to PXE boot the workstation, it requires a network connection.
You already have a DHCP server, A DNS server, and a TFTP server. Setting up an FTP server is trivial.
Unless you plan to PXE boot the machine, pull the cat 5 line and walk out of the room with the machine, I don't see the problem.
-
I'm not following how the FTP server relates to the NFS server. But I'm not seeing the benefit of having the tcz's mounted into the local filesystem via NFS and thus making the NFS server a required always on part of every system attached to it versus letting the system download the tcz's it needs and then going on it's own.
-
Then use the copy2fs flag.
The client machines do not need NFS server onboard. Core has the nfs client built-in and does not need any client loaded to load extensions from an NFS server.
-
If you prefer a HTTP wget loop, you can do so in bootsync.sh, but gerald_clark is correct that httplist is too early to load many extensions properly.
-
I'm still not following why I should be having a problem. All the extensions get downloaded during tc-config. It's all working. What's broken about it?
-
Extension startup scripts may do things which expect the system to be up. Users to be fully setup, etc.
-
Httplist was designed to load drivers to support a network based tce directory using NFS, NBD, AOE etc. There is no dep handling, and high level services have not yet been started.
-
Fair enough. But wouldn't having the extensions on an NFS mount mean that every time something in an extension was accessed the system would have to go to the network to read the whole file just to get to the one file in the squashfs archive? Sounds inefficient.
-
As I stated before, you can set the copy2fs flag, which will cause the extension to be copied to RAM when tce-loaded.