I am working on configuring some machines to netboot a Linux distribution. I decided to use Ubuntu 6.10 (Edgy Eft), and found plenty of documentation on configuring previous releases for diskless operation. However, I could not find any that worked with 6.10.
Due to recent Linux development (namely initramfs and early user space), features that used to be configured in the kernel are now handled by the initramfs. In particular, between Ubuntu 6.06 and 6.10 mounting root over NFS moved from kernel-space to user-space.
To configure a machine to mount root over NFS,
edit /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf to include
BOOT=nfs and MODULES=netboot.
Next run update-initramfs -u -k kernel-version.
Also, you no longer need ip=dhcp or root=/dev/nfs
in the kernel argument line.
You can even get rid of nfsroot=server:/path/to/root
if your DHCP server supports specifying a boot-path option
(Ubuntu's does, but OpenBSD's doesn't).
Other than that, the instructions on setting up a DHCP, TFTP, and NFS server remain the same, so I won't bother repeating them here.
Matthew R. Dempsky <mrd@alkemio.org>