HP Integrity BL860c Server Blade Linux Installation white paper

The basic PXE boot process is as follows:
– The PXE firmware broadcasts a DHCP discovery packet on the network
– Upon receiving the DHCP discovery packet, the DHCP server negotiates with the client to
ultimately issue an IP address lease, determined by the DHCP configuration, and the path
to a startup file on the TFTP server.
– The client then downloads and executes the startup file.
A PXE/DHCP and TFTP server must be set up to host the Linux boot loader, boot loader
configuration file, kernel image, and initial RAM disk image. Install and configure your
PXE/DHCP and TFTP server using its corresponding documentation. The boot loader for Linux
on HP Integrity servers (including the BL860c server blade) is elilo.efi and is found on the
OS distribution installation media (the steps for retrieving files from the Linux distribution media
are provided in this section). Additionally, it is available from the :
http://sourceforge.net/projects/elilo
The elilo.efi boot loader retrieves the elilo.conf configuration file. This file indicates
where to retrieve the Linux installation boot kernel and the initrd image file containing the
initial memdisk file system. The elilo.efi boot loader then loads the kernel and initrd
image and executes the kernel. When started with DHCP, elilo on HP Integrity servers attempts
to download its configuration file by trying several names in the following order (described in
the netbooting.txt file delivered with the elilo source):
– AABBCCDD.conf
where:
AABBCCDD is the hexadecimal representation of the assigned IP address and must be upper
case characters.
– AA[BB[CC[]-ia64.conf
where:
AABBCC is the hexadecimal representation of the first 3 octets, or subnet, of the assigned IP
address.
– elilo-ia64.conf (commonly used)
– elilo.conf
The elilo-ia64.conf file contains basic configuration information and an entry for each
available kernel image as in the following example:
# Sample elilo-ia64.conf file
chooser=textmenu
message=main.msg
prompt
timeout=10
image=images/RHEL4u4/vmlinuz
label=netinst-rhel4u4
description="Install RHEL4u4 Release"
initrd=images/RHEL4u4/initrd
read-only
append="askmethod ramdisk_size=12288 maxcpus=1"
image=images/SLES10/vmlinuz
label=nfsinst-sles10
description="Install SLES10 Release"
initrd=images/SLES10/initrd
append="ramdisk_size=131072"
In this example, elilo will draw a selection menu listing the available boot images identified
by their description fields, Install RHEL4U4 Release and Install SLES10 Release,
This menu will include color attributes, a message (as contained in the file specified in the message
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