Making Root for a Boot via Network

While having a last job for Tektronix, I was working on an imageserver project to save away client partitions to a central server. It did turn out that there are quite some projects around but none of them would quite fit into the requirements model assumed so far. In the end I was looking over the linux grub netboot documents and the various software parts like partimage trying to be somewhat similar to norton ghost.

Grub Netboot - Next Try For A Howto

I was checking how to make a grub boot floppy. Background: most of the netboot installations are assuming a dhcp (or bootp) protocol that would assign an IP to a client and inform it about the server to draw it images from. However, I wanted to have a static IP and/or specifying a server being fully different than the information in the dhcp cache. (work in progress)

Grub Install - For Common Users

The grub-install does not quite tell us howto make a boot floppy with a grub boot record that can grab its boot files from a network server. Everyone says it can do it - but most docs ask the user to recompile gnu grub. I have developped some python scripts that can help in building even a Gtk GUI for making grub boot floppies.

Partition Cloning - Freshmeat Entries

There are lots of tools that shall help with saving/restoring partitions but it does turn out most of them are (a) just hacks (b) developped for cluster computing (c) with no documentation to customize the boot floppy (d) because everything is configured on the central dhcp server.

Partimage - links

It seems that partimage does have the least number of weirdo dependencies so that there is a good chance to customize by programming the source code. However, partimage is inherintly buggy being a hunch of c++ source code that will not compile with every c++ compiler around. The partimage preconfigured bootfloppy is broken actually. The g4u looks to be a lot more stable - but that one is really just "ftp" and "dd" wrapped in a hunch of poorly documented shell scripts.