[finnix] Attempting to be sneaky with pxeboot, need help.

[Joel Stiller]

Sooo, let me start with what I am trying to do, and how far I've got.

My goal is to boot finnix over the network, using only the kernel and
the minirt image file. Then use the toram option, so no disk is
needed. This will ultimately allow me to boot multiple machines to a
finnix image for Disaster Recovery of a large amount of SLES servers.
I am not in any way using NFSroot.

Ok, so I mounted the old minirt file and copied the contents of
/FINNNIX/* to /image/. I then hacked the init script to add a
"frominit" option. All this does is trick the init script into
thinking the media has been found, and copies the contents of /image/*
to /ramdisk/cdrom. The "toram" option takes care of the rest of the
dirty work.

Now, here is my issue. When I pxe boot using the 32bit linux kernel
provided with the finnix CD, it pukes and I get an error about not
being able to mount the root fs. So I was playing around and booted to
the SLES kernel we normally use for autoyast, and passed it a bogus
initrd=fakeinit.
This then drops me to a boot:
>From there if I pass the following - finnix frominit toram, IT BOOTS!

So that tells me my hacks work just fine, but I'm guessing the kernel
needs to either have something added, or a couple config options
changed? Can anyone point me in the right direction, or better yet
provide instructions on what I need to do?

Also, what about adding this option to the next release? I'd be happy
to provide the very minor changes I made to the init script. For me
(and possibly others) this would be a very cool option for system
recovery on a wide scale.

Thanks,
Joel

PS. Once the minirt image is loaded (About 15 seconds) finnix boots in
about 5 seconds flat. :)

PPS My subscribe email got stuck in the spam filter, so if a mod sees
2 of these, just remove one please!