If your machine is connected to a local area network, you may be able to boot it over the network from another machine, using TFTP. If you intend to boot the installation system from another machine, the boot files will need to be placed in specific locations on that machine, and the machine configured to support booting of your specific machine. You need to setup a TFTP server, and for CATS machines, a BOOTP server , or RARP server , or DHCP server. The Reverse Address Resolution Protocol (RARP) is one way to tell your client what IP address to use for itself. Another way is to use the BOOTP protocol. BOOTP is an IP protocol that informs a computer of its IP address and where on the network to obtain a boot image. Yet another alternative exists on VMEbus systems: the IP address can be manually configured in boot ROM. The DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) is a more flexible, backwards-compatible extension of BOOTP. Some systems can only be configured via DHCP. For PowerPC, if you have a NewWorld Power Macintosh machine, it is a good idea to use DHCP instead of BOOTP. Some of the latest machines are unable to boot using BOOTP. Unlike the Open Firmware found on Sparc and PowerPC machines, the SRM console will not use RARP to obtain its IP address, and therefore you must use BOOTP for net booting your Alpha. You can also enter the IP configuration for network interfaces directly in the SRM console. Alpha systems can also be net-booted using the DECNet MOP (Maintenance Operations Protocol), but this is not covered here. Presumably, your local OpenVMS operator will be happy to assist you should you have some burning need to use MOP to boot Linux on your Alpha. Some older HPPA machines (e.g. 715/75) use RBOOTD rather than BOOTP. An RBOOTD package is available on the parisc-linux web site. The Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP) is used to serve the boot image to the client. Theoretically, any server, on any platform, which implements these protocols, may be used. In the examples in this section, we shall provide commands for SunOS 4.x, SunOS 5.x (a.k.a. Solaris), and GNU/Linux. &tftp-rarp.xml; &tftp-bootp.xml; &tftp-dhcp.xml; To get the TFTP server ready to go, you should first make sure that tftpd is enabled. This is usually enabled by having something like the following line in /etc/inetd.conf: tftp dgram udp wait nobody /usr/sbin/tcpd in.tftpd /tftpboot Debian packages will in general set this up correctly by default when they are installed. Look in that file and remember the directory which is used as the argument of in.tftpd; you'll need that below. The -l argument enables some versions of in.tftpd to log all requests to the system logs; this is useful for diagnosing boot errors. If you've had to change /etc/inetd.conf, you'll have to notify the running inetd process that the file has changed. On a Debian machine, run /etc/init.d/inetd reload; on other machines, find out the process ID for inetd, and run kill -HUP inetd-pid. To use the Pre-boot Execution Environment (PXE) method of TFTP booting, you will need a TFTP server with tsize support. On a &debian; server, the atftpd and tftpd-hpa packages qualify. If your TFTP server is a GNU/Linux box running Linux 2.4.X you'll need to set the following on your server: echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_no_pmtu_disc to turn off Path MTU discovery, otherwise the Indy's PROM can't download the kernel. Furthermore, make sure TFTP packets are sent from a source port no greater than 32767, or the download will stall after the first packet. Again, it's Linux 2.4.X tripping this bug in the PROM, and you can avoid it by setting echo "2048 32767" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range to adjust the range of source ports the Linux TFTP server uses. Next, place the TFTP boot image you need, as found in , in the tftpd boot image directory. Generally, this directory will be /tftpboot. You'll have to make a link from that file to the file which tftpd will use for booting a particular client. Unfortunately, the file name is determined by the TFTP client, and there are no strong standards. On NewWorld Power Macintosh machines, you will need to set up the yaboot boot loader as the TFTP boot image. Yaboot will then retrieve the kernel and RAMdisk images via TFTP itself. For net booting, use the yaboot-netboot.conf. Just rename this to yaboot.conf in the TFTP directory. Often, the file that the TFTP client will look for is client-ip-in-hexclient-architecture. To compute client-ip-in-hex, take each byte of the client IP address and translate it into hexadecimal notation. If you have a machine handy with the bc program, you can use the program. First issue the obase=16 command to set the output to hex, then enter the individual components of the client IP one at a time. As for client-architecture, try out some values. For PXE booting, you can use the boot loader included with syslinux: pxelinux.0. The boot loader should be copied into the /tftpboot folder. Then create a subdirectory within /tftpboot named /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg, and within that directory create a text file default. Here is an example of a default file's contents: default lanlinux prompt 1 label lanlinux kernel vmlinuz append initrd=initrd.gz devfs=mount root=/dev/ram devfs=mount is important, because without it there may be problems mounting the initrd.gz file system once the kernel is booted. Finally, copy the vmlinuz and initrd.gz files (for the netboot installation method) from the Debian ftp archive into the /tftpboot folder, where the bootloader will be looking for them. For DECstations, there are tftpimage files for each subarchitecture, which contain both kernel and installer in one file. The naming convention is tftpimage-subarchitecture or tftpimage-subarchitecture.gz. If the tftpimage is gzipped (the name ends with .gz), you need to unpack it first with gunzip tftpimage-subarchitecture.gz, as DECstations cannot boot compressed files by TFTP. Copy the tftpimage file you would like to use to /tftpboot/tftpboot.img if you work with the example BOOTP/DHCP setups described above. The DECstation firmware boots by TFTP with the command boot #/tftp, where # is the number of the TurboChannel device from which to boot. On most DECstations this is "3". If the BOOTP/DHCP server does not supply the filename or you need to pass additional parameters, they can optionally be appended with the following syntax: boot #/tftp/filename param1=value1 param2=value2 ... Several DECstation firmware revisions show a problem with regard to net booting: the transfer starts, but after some time it stops with an a.out err. This can have several reasons: The firmware does not respond to ARP requests during a TFTP transfer. This leads to an ARP timeout and the transfer stops. The solution is to add the MAC address of the Ethernet card in the DECstation statically to the ARP table of the TFTP server. This is done by running arp -s IP-address MAC-address as root on the machine acting as TFTP server. The MAC-address of the DECstation can be read out by entering cnfg at the DECstation firmware prompt. The firmware has a size limit on the files that can be booted by TFTP. There are also firmware revisions that cannot boot via TFTP at all. An overview about the different firmware revisions can be found at the NetBSD web pages: . On Alpha, you must specify the filename (as a relative path to the boot image directory) using the -file argument to the SRM boot command, or by setting the BOOT_FILE environment variable. Alternatively, the filename can be given via BOOTP (in ISC dhcpd, use the filename directive). Unlike Open Firmware, there is no default filename on SRM, so you must specify a filename by either one of these methods. SPARC architectures for instance use the subarchitecture names, such as ``SUN4M'' or ``SUN4C''; in some cases, the architecture is left blank, so the file the client looks for is just client-ip-in-hex. Thus, if your system subarchitecture is a SUN4C, and its IP is 192.168.1.3, the filename would be C0A80103.SUN4C. You can also force some sparc systems to look for a specific file name by adding it to the end of the OpenPROM boot command, such as boot net my-sparc.image. This must still reside in the directory that the TFTP server looks in. For BVM and Motorola VMEbus systems copy the files &bvme6000-tftp-files; to /tftpboot/. Next, configure your boot ROMs or BOOTP server to initially load the tftplilo.bvme or tftplilo.mvme files from the TFTP server. Refer to the tftplilo.txt file for your subarchitecture for additional system-specific configuration information. On SGI Indys you can rely on the bootpd to supply the name of the TFTP file. It is given either as the bf= in /etc/bootptab or as the filename= option in /etc/dhcpd.conf. On some systems, the standard installation RAMdisk, combined with the memory requirements of the TFTP boot image, cannot fit in memory. In this case, you can still install using TFTP, you'll just have to go through the additional step of NFS mounting your root directory over the network as well. This type of setup is also appropriate for diskless or dataless clients. First, follow all the steps above in . Copy the Linux kernel image on your TFTP server using the a.out image for the architecture you are booting. Untar the root archive on your NFS server (can be the same system as your TFTP server): # cd /tftpboot # tar xvzf root.tar.gz Be sure to use the GNU tar (other tar programs, like the SunOS one, badly handle devices as plain files). Export your /tftpboot/debian-sparc-root directory with root access to your client. E.g., add the following line to /etc/exports (GNU/Linux syntax, should be similar for SunOS): /tftpboot/debian-sparc-root client(rw,no_root_squash) NOTE: "client" is the host name or IP address recognized by the server for the system you are booting. Create a symbolic link from your client IP address in dotted notation to debian-sparc-root in the /tftpboot directory. For example, if the client IP address is 192.168.1.3, do # ln -s debian-sparc-root 192.168.1.3 Installing with TFTP and NFS Root is similar to because you don't want to load the RAMdisk anymore but boot from the newly created NFS-root file system. You then need to replace the symlink to the tftpboot image by a symlink to the kernel image (for example, linux-a.out). RARP/TFTP requires all daemons to be running on the same server (the workstation is sending a TFTP request back to the server that replied to its previous RARP request).