asterisk users - Dec 2007 - PXE-bootable diskless Asterix distro?

Hello

Since I got the IBM Netvista to boot Linux, and am still waiting for
the Compact Flash cards that I ordered, I was wondering if someone
knew of an Asterisk distribution that can run on that kind of diskless
host?

I've taken a look at AstLinux and AskoziaPBX, but they both seem to be
meant to be installed on a solid-state medium instead of RAM. For
instance, the Netvista is unable to uncompress a kernel, so expects
"linux" instead of "vmlinuz", etc.

Or is it trivial even for a non-guru like me to modify such light
Asterisk distros to run diskless?

Thank you.

On Sun, 23 Dec 2007 02:34:45 +0100, Vincent wrote:
>Hello
>
>Since I got the IBM Netvista to boot Linux, and am still waiting for
>the Compact Flash cards that I ordered, I was wondering if someone
>knew of an Asterisk distribution that can run on that kind of diskless
>host?
>
>I've taken a look at AstLinux and AskoziaPBX, but they both seem to be
>meant to be installed on a solid-state medium instead of RAM. For
>instance, the Netvista is unable to uncompress a kernel, so expects
>"linux" instead of "vmlinuz", etc.
>
>Or is it trivial even for a non-guru like me to modify such light
>Asterisk distros to run diskless?
I'm not at all certain what you need to change on the hardware, but it
seems to me it should be trivial. Perhaps something in the BIOS? 

I've used both H-P and Neoware hardware with no problem at all. I
usually just set the BIOS to boot from a USB attached disk, then burn a
USB key from and Astlinix or Askozia image. There's nothing all that
special about the hardware. It's just a PC without a disk. 

PXE booting is really about having the boot image remoted from the
host. That might be convenient for some people because can switch out
or edit boot images easily. To my mind it has a a lot of administrative
overhead. But I'm no Linux guru. I find it easier to swap out USB boot
keys.

Michael 
--
Michael Graves
mgraves<at>mstvp.com
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c713-201-1262
sip:mjgraves at pixelpower.onsip.com
skype mjgraves
fwd 54245

On Sun, Dec 23, 2007 at 02:34:45AM +0100, Vincent wrote:
> Hello
> 
> Since I got the IBM Netvista to boot Linux, and am still waiting for
> the Compact Flash cards that I ordered, I was wondering if someone
> knew of an Asterisk distribution that can run on that kind of diskless
> host?
Yes. I have a version of our CD that boots from PXE. It took minor
changes and rebuilding as a "PXE image", as Debian Live has basic
support of that already.  For simplicity I figure you'll be after a
system that has everything in the initrd, but this is not the case here.
It mounts a network partition to do the rest. We use NFS. CIFS is also
supported. 

Debian Live takes a slightly different direction than astlinux and co.:
Instead of completely rebuilding your system to match a read-only
partition and read-write partition, just union-mount the read-write
partition over the basic read-only partition.

This technique is now common with live CDs. There are also ways to
rewrite some changes, but I have not played with them at all, so I can't
really say how effective they are.

You can get the ISO from http://updates.xorcom.com/iso/ (the live ISO).
Again, that is currently jsut a CD image, but it includes the full
configuration for rebuilding.

For more information about Debian Live:
http://debian-live.alioth.debian.org/ . I'm currently using there casper
as I have had problems getting initramfs-live on an Etch system (and had
no time to solve them). But initramfs-live may be more useful to you.


The really nice thing about that system is that it is a
fully-functioning Debian system. Just apt-get install extra software
(with the limitationsof your free RAM, of course).

-- 
               Tzafrir Cohen
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