KS file, floppy boot, and NIC not on boot floppy

[Derek Richardson]

Todd,
I haven't read the entire thread of discussion, as my mail is messed up 
right now, but there's two ways that I've done it in the past :
1) just take the bootnet.img from the latest RedHat distribution ( after 
all, the kernel you boot for install doesn't have to match what you use 
later ) and, if you're doing a floppy install, you dd it to a floppy ( 
dd if=${cdTree}/images/bootnet.img of=/dev/fd0 ) or, if you're doing a 
PXE file, just do option #2 until you get to mounting the bootnet image 
and then copy initrd.img and vmlinuz to somewhere accessible to PXE stuff ).
2) take same bootnet image, mount it as msdos loop device ( mount 
-tmsdos -oloop bootnet.img /tmp/loop ), copy the initrd.img over 
/tmp/something, gunzip the initrd ( gzip -dc initrd.img > /tmp/initrd ), 
mount that ( mkdir /tmp/initmnt ; mount -oloop /tmp/initrd /tmp/initmnt 
), then uncompress the modules.cgz to somewhere ( cd /tmp ; zcat 
/tmp/initmnt/modules/modules.cgz | cpio -i -d ).  By now, you should 
have a a directory w/ a kernel version number sitting in /tmp ( i.e. 
/tmp/2.4.2-2BOOT or somesuch ).  Now, provided that you have a module 
available that matches the kernel, copy it into that directory ( IIRC, 
RedHat install kernels match the distro's shipping version -BOOT kernel, 
so you should be able to install 
kernel-${smpArch}-${version}.${arch}.rpm and then copy over the module 
), then recompress it w/ cpio ( can't remember flags off top of my head, 
left as exercise for you ;) ).  Then install this compressed file ( 
which should be called modules.cgz ) back onto the mounted initrd, make 
sure the correct entry is in pcitable for that module + your card ( if 
it's too new to be in that bootnet's pcitable, pcitable table controls 
loading of module ), if it's not, look at http://pciids.sourceforge.net/ 
for your board, or you can pull some /proc investigation once you have 
kernel booted, I believe the /proc entry for the e1000 module should 
give you the board ID.  Anyways, then just unmount and recompress 
everything, as needed, to restore the "system" to the state it was 
previously in, and you should be golden.
I might not be %100 spot on w/ all the details, as I'm largely reciting 
this off my head and I haven't done it in a while, but feel free to 
e-mail me back w/ any questions.  What model # NIC are you trying to do 
this off of?  Also, please ignore the cc: to cos-sup at pgs.com, it's just 
an information mailing list for my work, and I figured while I'm 
rattling this out, my co-workers ought to hear it as well.
Regards,
Derek R.

-- 
Linux Administrator
derek.richardson at ieee.org
derek.richardson at pgs.com
Office 713-781-4000
Cell 713-817-1197
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why.
		-- Hunter S. Thompson