Diary of a Network Geek

The trials and tribulations of a Certified Novell Engineer who's been stranded in Houston, Texas.

11/3/2004

Novell ZENWorks Imaging Boot Secrets

Filed under: Fun Work,Geek Work,Linux,Novell,Personal — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Hare which is terribly early in the morning or 6:45 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is a Full Moon

I’m finally getting it!

Okay, so it only took three months and a visit from a Novell Service Engineer for me to finally get it, but I have. Here’s the big secret to making ZENWorks imaging Linux boot CDs: key information is not anywhere to be found on the web. But, of course, the Network Geek will share with his loyal readers.
Now, I’ll do this in more detail later, but here it is in a nutshell. To update the bootable CD, first, get a good image and, using the instructions for adding a driver to the ZEN Boot image, get into the initrd.gz file on a machine that has the kernel version you want to update the CD to use. Now, copy all the drivers you want to use from the patched/updated server to the mounted initrd filesystem. Unmount that and re GZIP it. Now, copy your bzImage, or whatever, to a temp directory and rename it to “kernel”. Now, copy both of these files into the ISO, or make a new one with everything else on the CD. Burn it and go.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I went too fast, I’ll do it again with more detail later. I just was excited about it and had to throw that out there. Way cool!

2 Comments

  1. OK I’m a newbee with Zenworks 6.5 and want to see this in action…but there are no instructions, where do I begain?

    Comment by Larry — 11/21/2004 @ 12:48 am

  2. Start by clicking on the link in the post. Also, try this link: http://www.novell.com/coolsolutions/zenworks/features/tips/t_add_drivers_intel_zw.html or this one: http://support.novell.com/cgi-bin/search/searchtid.cgi?/10070123.htm
    These two are mostly all I used. My biggest problem here was getting the kernel versions right and also getting the goofy LSI driver to compile correctly.
    I’d have done more in the way of getting this info up on the site or in the blog, but my wife is divorcing me, so I have other priorities right now. Good luck.

    Comment by Network Geek — 11/21/2004 @ 9:21 am

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