CRCnet uses a lot of 
Soekris BiscuitPC's and I wanted a nice fast way to install and configure them.
Each soekris has a compact flash slot into which we insert a 64MB compact flash card, this is the system disk. It is mounted read-only during normal operation and we use a custom built linux distribution. The Soekris BIOS supports PXE booting. The solution that I came up with PXEboots the soekris, copies a basic system onto the flash card, reboots the biscuit PC and configures it automatically, minimal user interaction is required.
You need two components to get PXE boot successfully. A dhcp server and a tftp server to serve up pxelinux and your kernel.
You'll need the following options in your DHCP configuration such that the machine you want to PXE boot is passed them.
next-server 10.1.224.254;
- Filename to load off the tftp server
filename "pxelinux.0";
If you are running debian, make sure you are using the tftpd-hpa package. Set your tftproot to /tftproot. Inside tftproot you need to put the pxelinux.0 image and create a pxelinux.cfg directory. Inside this directory place a configuation file called default. It should contain the following
SERIAL 0,19200 DEFAULT soekris TIMEOUT 30 PROMPT 1 IPAPPEND 1
label soekris
kernel bzImage-2.4.26-bpc-pxe append root=/dev/nfs nfsroot=10.1.224.254:/exports/soekris ip=:::::eth0:dhcp panic=10 ramdisk_size=32768 console=ttyS0,19200n8
You also need to ensure the kernel image referenced above (in the kernel line) is in /tftproot
Once you have the system PXE booting successfully and loading the NFS file system you are almost home and hosed. To achieve the configuration of the machine and install the flash card I simply editted the inittab file on the nfs root to load a shell script rather than spawning a getty. This shell script mounts the flash card read-only and copies a base image across on to it. This step is likely to be very user specific. Once the installation and configuration is complete the biscuit pc can be rebooted and it's up and running.
No other page links to SoekrisPXEBoot yet.
