[CentOS] Trying to create a custom initrd that will work with PXE Booting

[James Pearson]

Clint Dilks wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am trying to create a custom initrd that will work with PXE Booting on 
> CentOS release 4.5 (Final) and Fedora Core 6.  Can anyone point me to 
> some documentation that will help with this ?
> 
> The specific situation is that we have received some machines that need 
> the latest e1000 Driver from Intel in order to detect the network card.  
> If I install the systems without network and then do rpmbuild -tb 
> e1000-7.6.9.tar.gz a RPM is built and can be installed, and the Network 
> card works fine as soon as you load the new e1000 Module.  But we could 
> be receiving a number of these systems so a Kickstart installation is 
> required.
> 
> I have tried installing the version of the kernel uses during kick start 
> installs and then creating and installing the e1000 rpm and then 
> updating the pxe initrd with the version of e1000.ko that is created but 
> still the the card isn't detected.
> 
> Another thing I have tried is creating a respin using Pungi and then 
> using the PXE images that this generates but still no joy.
> 
> I do know that the Card works fine with CentOS 5 and Fedora 7.  Aside 
> from upgrading to these does anyone have any suggestions? :)

You might want to try the RHEL4 kernels at 
<http://people.redhat.com/~jbaron/rhel4/> - these will become (with 
possibly some more tweaks) the 4.6 kernels

They might have e1000 updates you need.

James Pearson