PXE booting (gzip out of memory error) and removing EULA

[dyjakon]

Hi everyone,

I've been playing with SUSE Studio Onsite for a few weeks now.  I must say it makes developing images a lot easier. The challenge I'm faced with is that I want to create a small linux distro (i've been making JeOS builds) that will run up from the PXE network when someone plugs their laptop or server into the network.
I've got the PXE setup correctly and everything as I've been using it to distribute other image for firmware upgrades etc. I'm using Altiris Deployment Solution 6.9 SP5 ... and there's 2 small problems i've encountered:

1) When I create a PXE image with SUSE Onsite Studio, copy it to my pxe and modify the default file in the pxelinux.cfg folder (this is Altiris specific) the kernel loads and the initrd image also loads but then it gets stuck at the following messages:

Lookup network client config file again ...
Checking for config file: config.00:50:56:B6:51:FB
Checking for config file: config.group
Checking for config file: config.C0A86F09
etc etc etc
Checking for config file: config.default

Here is the contents of my default file:

default linux
label linux
        kernel initrd-netboot-suse-SLES11.i686-2.1.1.kernel
        append initrd=initrd-netboot-suse-SLES11.i686-2.1.1.gz root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=131072 maxcpus=1 quiet pci=norom PXE_SERVER=sci01pxe PXE_IP=192.168.111.250 PXE_PATH=MenuOption162\X86PC PXE_OID=162 PXE_RID=162

The image doesn't effectively boot. Its just stuck looking for the config.default file. There is a JeOSSLES11SP1.i686-0.0.13.config file in the same folder on the PXE as the initrd and kernel files, and i've even renamed it to config.default, however the server still doesn't boot. Still keeps searching for the config file. What can i do ?

Now my 2nd question:
2) I've been using Test Drive to test my builds. One thing I find is that every time i start a JeOS image i've created it asks me to accept a Novell EULA. Is there are way to remove this acceptance process ?
Basically I want the image to automatically boot all the way through to the prompt but right now it gets stuck on the EULA acceptance page asking for "Y"

Any tips on how to edit either Suse Studio Onsite or the image that i'm making itself to not display any EULA at all in the beginning and boot straight through to the prompt ?

[dyjakon]

I've managed to fix both issues I had to an extent.

Issue 1:

The files had to be put into subfolders. Because I was using Altiris Deployment, the structure was different than what was expected by the created image.

config.defailt needed to go to:
C:\Program Files\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\PXE\Images\KIWI\

the initrd and filesystem images needed to go to:
C:\Program Files\Altiris\eXpress\Deployment Server\PXE\Images\image\

Issue 2:

You need to create a file called: /etc/init.d/suse_studio_firstboot

add some random text in there, e.g. echo "Hello World"

Save the file. Sync the drive. Build the next image in Suse Studio including the suse_studio_firstboot



So I'm having a new issue now. The server (Vmware VM) boots into the PXE image I created. However I've run into a small problem.Hi All,

I've got a small problem on my hands. I've installed Suse Studio Onsite and have been creating a JeOS image which I want to act as a thin client.
I can create a PXE image with Suse Studio Onsite successfully boot a VM using that image from my PXE server.
The issue I'm having is that once I add on a few more packages the image stops loading.
After doing some investigating it turns out that once the images exceeds a certain size, JeOS panics with a "Out of memory" error while trying to run gzip.

I've tried building a SLES PXE image and a Minimal X PXE image, both do that same thing. All of them seem to hang at around the same time.
I checked on my TFTP server and here are my observations:

When the image size is 291 MB the TFTP server reports that it was able to send around 220332032 bytes ( approx 75%) of the image
When the image size is 317 MB the TFTP server reports that it was able to send around 209518592 bytes ( approx 65%) of the image
When the image size is 323 MB the TFTP server reports that it was able to send around 202211328 bytes ( approx 62%) of the image

So it seems to me like there's a limitation somewhere around the kernel or something that prohibits loading a gz compressed file larger than around 220MB

This is not a ramdisk issue. I've tried increasing the ramdisk size (as you can see from my images) and it didn't solve the problem.

To make matters more interesting, if i unzip the JeOS image from the gz container (the size will go from say 311 MB to 1.4GB) and make appropriate changes so that the PXE booting sequence boots from the uncompressed image rather than the compressed image, the image will LOAD SUCCESSFULLY.

I've tried 3 TFTP servers: Solarwinds, Altiris Deployment Server TFTP and TFTPD32. All of them report exactly the same things. So i know this is not a TFTP issue.

So it seems like there's an issue somewhere where the gz file is being copied to ?
I believe that is somewhere like /dev/fd ?
there's not enough space there ?

How can that be increased ?

If i press ALT+F4, i can see the following messages: