Installing new machines for the IWI in 2007
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Installing new machines for the IWI in 2007

Jurjen Bokma

September 2007

Procedure 79.  Log

  1. Changing BIOS settings

    1. Under Storage->Boot order: Put "Hard drive, integrated SATA" on top, followed by "Network Controller". Disabled all other (CD-ROM and USB)

    2. Under Storage -> Storage Options: Disabled Removable Media Boot and Legacy Diskette Drive. Set "SATA Emulation" to "RAID"

    3. Under Advanced -> Power-On options: Set Post Messages to Enable. Set MEBx Setup Prompt to Displayed Set After Power Loss to Previous State

    4. Under Advanced -> Onboard Devices: Set "Diskette Controller" to Disable.

    5. Left all other settings as they were, most notably under Advanced -> Device Options: left S5 Wake on LAN at "Enable"

    6. Saved changes and Exit

  2. Put the machine in the DHCP config

  3. The NIC fails to be detected.

    1. According to an Ubuntu forum thread, the Intel e1000 driver is too old. Fetched a new one here, and put it on a machine with the same kernel as the install we are running (that is demanded in the README of the driver). Unpacked, compiled.

    2. On the install server, copied the initrd.gz to a temp directory, unpacked it, created a directory 'ramdisk', cd into it and dit cpio -i < ../initrd

    3. Copied the new e1000.ko over the old ramdisk/lib/modules/2.6.18-5-amd64/kernel/drivers/net/e1000/e1000.ko.

    4. In ramdisk, did find . | cpio -o -H newc > ../initrd then cd .. and gzip -9 initrd

    5. Copied the new initrd to the tftp tree, restarted the master's tftp daemon

    6. Copied the amd64 tftp subtree to the local tftp server (for speed)

    7. Updated /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf: 

      if substring (option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 3) = "d-i"
            {
                  filename "ftp://master.grid.rug.nl/d-i/grid-preseed-iwi.txt" ;
            }

    8. Restarted the DHCP daemon, and restarted the client

      Installation starts...

  4. Install does not complete

    1. Removed “DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive” from kernel parameters in /var/lib/tftpboot/debian/etch/amd64/debian-installer/amd64/pxelinux.cfg/default. Now we see the usual menus, only the disappear again as they are filled in by the preseed.

    2. We get the error “No root file system (is defined)”

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