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 many machines, a BOOTP server .
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.
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.
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 Section 4.2.1, “Where to Find Installation Images”, 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.