bl460c Gen 8 network drivers for RHEL 5.7

[joseph pareti]

the rhel 5.7 distribution does not contain the needed drivers pxe booting the following configuration:

HP BL460c Gen8 10Gb FLB CTO Blade

HP Flex-10 10Gb 2P 530FLB FIO Adptr

HP BLc Cisco B22HP Fabric Ext Module

could you please advice how to procced; the requirement is pxe boot without any kernel params such as DriverDisk

would spp fix it? is it related to RHEL being out of sync?

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=3709945&prodSeriesId=5177949&swItem=MTX-ce781be0e6924ce3bab971f01a&prodNameId=5177950&swEnvOID=4004&swLang=8&taskId=135&mode=4&idx=2

[joseph pareti]

I am adding some detaIl to the previous request:

We have a Red Hat Enterprise 5 .7 image, with this image we have to boot and install our server over the network.

The first step, within a PXE environment, is to download - from the TFTP server - the kernel and initrd. This initrd is a small read-only file system that is created by Redhat and contains all the drivers.

In a modification of this initrd (eg by adding a new driver) would lose the support of RH. Anyway this is not easy, because the boot image and initrd must fit together, which is checked at every boot. -> not an option

We could still build a so-called Driver Disk from the network drives and remember to note this as a kernel parameter in PXE. Basically this would work, but this functionality is not supported by our Admin Toolkit. -> not an option

The only option from a technical perspective is an update to RHE5u8, but this would affect the entire server farm, and should be planned accordingly.

[Matti_Kurkela]

A typical PXE bootloader only loads the kernel and the initrd file using the firmware PXE networking code. After the bootloader starts the Linux kernel, the firmware PXE code is gone - it cannot be used any more. So if the installation initrd does not include a suitable network driver, then the system cannot fetch any more files over the network to continue the installation. It will be stuck, prompting for an installation source on the console.

You might be able to put the Kickstart configuration file and the driver disk image (usually available as a separate download from HP) to an USB stick and use that to allow the installation to continue - but if you need to physically plug something extra to the blade for the installation, you'll lose the main point of a network installation. Maybe you could use the iLO Virtual Media functions to supply those files remotely?

 But if you are restricted to whatever your "Admin Toolkit" can do, this might not be an option.

So I think you've answered your own question.