Upgrade from 8.04 to 10.04 LTS (BORKED)

[Tom H]

On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 10:16 PM, Christopher Chan
<christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk> wrote:
> On Monday, September 13, 2010 10:06 AM, Tom H wrote:
>> On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 9:33 PM, Christopher Chan
>> <christopher.chan at bradbury.edu.hk>  wrote:
>>>
>>> I did not look seriously before, but does grub2 have serial support? I
>>> know it does not have PXE or network support. In some ways, grub2 is a
>>> regression.
>>
>> grub2 does have serial support (you have to remember to create a
>> ttyS0.conf; the equivalent of adding a ttyS0 line in inittab in the
>> past) and I vaguely remember that there is pxe boot but only for bios
>> boxes not for efi ones or others; vaguely.
>
> Well, what do you know, it seems to actually support PXE directly too. I
> take it it means no more drivers per chip to compile into grub needed
> like it did with grub or rather pxegrub?

Just looked up the manual:

Booting GRUB from the network

The following instructions only work on PC BIOS systems where the
Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) is available.

To generate a PXE boot image, run:

     grub-mkimage --format=i386-pc --output=core.img
--prefix='(pxe)/boot/grub' pxe pxecmd
     cat /boot/grub/pxeboot.img core.img >grub.pxe

Copy grub.pxe, /boot/grub/*.mod, and /boot/grub/*.lst to the PXE
(TFTP) server, ensuring that *.mod and *.lst are accessible via the
/boot/grub/ path from the TFTP server root. Set the DHCP server
configuration to offer grub.pxe as the boot file (the ‘filename’
option in ISC dhcpd).

After GRUB has started, files on the TFTP server will be accessible
via the ‘(pxe)’ device.

The server and gateway IP address can be controlled by changing the
‘(pxe)’ device name to ‘(pxe:server-ip)’ or
‘(pxe:server-ip:gateway-ip)’. Note that this should be changed both in
the prefix and in any references to the device name in the
configuration file.

GRUB provides several environment variables which may be used to
inspect or change the behaviour of the PXE device:

‘net_pxe_ip’
    The IP address of this machine. Read-only.
‘net_pxe_mac’
    The network interface's MAC address. Read-only.
‘net_pxe_hostname’
    The client host name provided by DHCP. Read-only.
‘net_pxe_domain’
    The client domain name provided by DHCP. Read-only.
‘net_pxe_rootpath’
    The path to the client's root disk provided by DHCP. Read-only.
‘net_pxe_extensionspath’
    The path to additional DHCP vendor extensions provided by DHCP. Read-only.
‘net_pxe_boot_file’
    The boot file name provided by DHCP. Read-only.
‘net_pxe_dhcp_server_name’
    The name of the DHCP server responsible for these boot parameters.
Read-only.
‘pxe_blksize’
    The PXE transfer block size. Read-write, defaults to 512.
‘pxe_default_server’
    The default PXE server. Read-write, although setting this is only
useful before opening a PXE device.
‘pxe_default_gateway’
    The default gateway to use when contacting the PXE server.
Read-write, although setting this is only useful before opening a PXE
device.