kickstart install on proliant 1600

[K.C. Chan]

All,
I am trying to do a kickstart install over nfs on proliant 1600. For some reason it's not finding the tlan driver? Any idea? FYI, it's redhat73. Thanks.

[Steven E. Protter]

Who built the lan card?

If its Intel or bay networks, I know from personal experience that these will be detected by redhat and work in this mode.

Did the NIC card ever work?

Are the link lights lit?

Can you try a cd based install and see if it effect the situation?


http://www.isnamerica.com
Call me anything you want, but don't forget to call me to dinner.
Steven E. Protter

[Steven E. Protter]

Who built the lan card?

If its Intel or bay networks, I know from personal experience that these will be detected by redhat and work in this mode.

Did the NIC card ever work?

Are the link lights lit?

Can you try a cd based install and see if it effect the situation?


http://www.isnamerica.com
Call me anything you want, but don't forget to call me to dinner.
Steven E. Protter

[K.C. Chan]

it's thunderland base ethernet

[K.C. Chan]

Here's the detail of the card from another proliant 1600, I believe it's the same card, fyi, the reason I got this one to install bec. it's had a secondary card on it.

01:07.0 Network controller: Compaq Computer Corporation ProLiant Integrated Netelligent 10/100 (rev 10)
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 64, IRQ 5
I/O ports at 2800 [size=16]
Memory at c6cfddf0 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16]
Expansion ROM at [disabled] [size=64K]

any idea, why kickstart does not detect the lan card? I know it's just a matter of forcing to load this driver (tlan.o), but how I do it in kickstart? BTW, I used the CDROM (first CD of rh73) to do the kickstart install. Any idea on how to get it to install with current NIC card? Thanks.

[Bill Douglass]

Probably because the inird.img used in a kickstart install does not include the tlan driver. Here is a list of drivers from my custom kickstart CD:

Version 0
3c59x
eth
"3Com 3c590/3c595/3c90x/3cx980"
8139too
eth
"RTL8139, SMC EZ Card Fast Ethernet"
e1000
eth
"Intel EtherExpress/1000 gigabit"
eepro100
eth
"Intel EtherExpress Pro 100B"
ne2k-pci
eth
"PCI NE2000 clones"
pcnet32
eth
"AMD PCnet32"
tulip
eth
"DEC 21040, most 21*40 Ethernet"
io "Base I/O address"



If you can upgrade, I believe you will find better driver support with RH8 or 9.
If you have PXE support on your Proliant, you can set up a PXE boot server and use that to specify a fully configured initrd.img (like the one the CD install uses).


If you have to do a CD-based kickstart, you need to just through many hoops to get it working:


To make a new 7.3 kickstrart CD with tlan support:

1) mount the bootnet.img file:

mount -o loop bootnet.img /mnt/image

2) Uncompress the initrd.img file

zcat /mnt/image/initrd.img > /tmp/initrd.img.uncompressed

3) Mount the uncompresed initrd.img

mount -o loop /tmp/initrd.img.uncompressed /mnt/initrd

4) Remove unneeded modules from modules.cgz and add your tlan driver.

zcat /mnt/initrd/modules/modules.cgz > /tmp/modules.cpio
cpio -iv < /tmp/modules.cpio
cp /path/to/tlan/driver /tmp/2.4.18-3BOOT/
cd /tmp/2.4.18-3BOOT/
find . -print | cpio -o > /tmp/modules.cpio.new
gzip /tmp/modules/cpio.nre
mv /tmp/modules/cpio.new.gz /mnt/initrd/modules/modules.cgz

[K.C. Chan]

how about making a kickstart on floppy with tlan support? Is the same as the CD? Thanks.

[Bill Douglass]

It's very similar to creating a custom boot CD, since both use a 1.44MB image for booting.

With the floppy, you write your image to disk using dd; with the CD, you create an ISO image and use something like cdrecord to burn it to a blank CD.

Either way, it is a lot of work to set up.

How many of these boxes do you have, and do they support PXE booting?

[K.C. Chan]

There's two of these box. As far as PXE, I am not sure what this or know where to look if it supports pxe. Seems to me that it would be easier just to install from CDs. But for learning purpose, I just want to know how it would be accomplish. Thanks for your help.