I want to install Debian testing on a diskless machine (i.e. no floppy, no CDROM, no hard disk) using DHCP/TFTP and NFS. Besides being diskless, the machine is a standard Pentium PC with a NIC which has an etherboot EPROM to boot via DHCP/TFTP.
As described in the Debian Installation Guide, section 4.6 "Preparing Files for TFTP Net Booting", I have downloaded and installed netboot.tar.gz (from etch) on the server machine, configured DHCP and TFTP (and GRUB, since instead of PXE, I boot nbgrub via TFTP, then load the debian kernel and initd.gz from GRUB). I can boot the debian kernel, initrd and debian installer on the diskless client, choose language, country, keyboard layout, timezone, configure the clock and network, configure the debian mirror to use. But then the installer wants to detect and partition disk drives to do the installation on. It doesn't allow to select an NFS-mounted directory to install. When skipping the partitioning the installer can't proceed, since it has no disk to use as a target. I then tried to switch to a shell and to manually do a mkdir /target; mount server:/tftpboot/client-dir /target since I know /target is used in other installations. However, the mount command in the initrd's busybox seems to be unable to do NFS mounts. This is where I am stuck. How can I do the installation to the server disk when the client isn't able to mount it? A second way would be not to run the installation on the client, but prepare the directory to be exported to the client directly on the server. I think this is what debootsrap is for, but I haven't found any good documentation how to use it. The Debian Installation Guide doesn't describe it. According to the man page I have run ARCH=i386 debootstrap etch /tftpboot/client-dir which populates the target directory with a minimal system but don't know how to proceed from here. I could probably tweak the result by some editing in /etc, installing/building a kernel and initrd, but I hope there is an easier way. Can anyone give me a hint on this? urs -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]