A patch for SystemRescueCd

About:

Please note that this patch is obsoleted by SystemRescueCd V0.4.4-beta4!
This is a patch for the System Rescue CD to modify the PXE booting mechanism to eleminate the need for an additional webserver. It has been verified and worked with all three different flavors of SysRescCd: rescuecd, vmlinuz2 and rescue64.

Download:

News:

2008-01-15
Ran a test of all three flavors, all of them booted fine.
2008-01-11
Initial release

Usage:

Here's the part of the pxelinux.cfg-file I use to bring up my patched version of sysresccd: 

 KERNEL /sysresccd/rescuecd
 APPEND initrd=/sysresccd/svolli.cpio.gz video=ofonly vga=0 cdroot scandelay=5 boottftp=/sysresccd/sysrcd.dat dostartx
The files sysrcd.dat is loaded from the specified directory and sysrcd.md5 is loaded from the same as sysrcd.dat.

To generate a patched initrd (called "svolli.cpio.gz" in my case) you'll do the following as root: 

 # mkdir initrd
 # cd initrd
 # gzip -dc (path to rescuecd.igz, rescue64.igz or vmlinuz2.igz including the filename) | cpio -i
 # bzip2 -dc (path to patch) | patch -p1
 # find * | cpio -H newc -o | gzip > ../svolli.cpio.gz
This should leave you with a new initrd capable of booting using tftp only. After patching and before repacking it's a good idea to check for the files init.rej and usr/share/udhcpc/default.script.rej . If one or both these two exist, it means that the patching failed and I need to put up a new patch. Please contact me under the email address available here.

Known bugs:

Bugverified workaround
Downloading of main filesystem via webserver does not work anymore. This is correct and intended. Use the original SysRescCd image. From the implementation side, replacing the http download machanism with a tftp one was easier. Since there was no reaction to my offering of implementing a version capable of both, I decided to release this patch.

This software is free software and distributed under the license terms of the GPL.

Enjoy,
  SvOlli
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