Installing Debian Sarge Linux on a IBM HS20 Blade (HOWTO)
- Start the management interface on your local machine
- Open a console for the remote Blade
- Attach the local CDROM drive to the remote destination Blade
- Boot the remote Blade from the local CDROM
- Press <F1>(Using the console's F1 button) in order to get into
the install disk menu
- By using the respective function key jump into the menu with the
special boot characters
- Choose and enter the command line that disables framebuffer
(with framebuffer display, which is on by default you won't see
anything in the console)
- You will possibly need to switch around the console's keyboard
settings in order to be able to enter the "special" characters
"/" and "=" (the console wouldn't map the local swissgerman
keyboard correctly. I had to use the US, the Italian and the
German keyboard settings in order to be able to enter all the
charcters I needed throughout the installation process)
- Now proceed with the installation which will quite soon fail,
because the installer won't find the CDROM drive, because
it's internally attached over USB
- Change into the next terminal with Alt-F2 and issue a
modprobe usb-uhci which will load the required
USB drivers. You should see this when you issue a
dmesg to display the kernel messages
- Issue a
hw-detect to make the Debian installer
rescan the HW and this time detect the CDROM which is connected
via the USB-storage and the SCSI-over-USB drivers
- Press Alt-F1 (click on the Alt and F1 buttons of the console) to
return to the installer
- Press "OK" to let the installer search for the CDROM drive once
more which it should find and you should be able to continue
the install process
- At the machine where this procedure was tested, the two Broadcom
BCM 5703 Tiga NetXtreme gigabit ethernet cards on the Blade were
in trunking mode and thus Linux' tg3.o driver wouldn't be able to
access the net out of the box. The connection to the switch had
to be changed to "normal" mode in order for the driver to be
able to communicate
- Now before you restart, be aware that currently the first SCSI
disk /dev/sca1 for Linux is the SCSI over USB CDROM drive and the
local hard disk on the local SCSI controller at /dev/scb1. But
as soon as you'll restart, the USB driver will not yet be
installed and instead the local SCSI contoller will be at
/dev/sca1
- Thus when you restart, as soon as you get into GRUB's boot loader
menu change the boot device from boot=/dev/scb1 to boot=/dev/sca1
- That's it. Let me know if this HOWTO has helped you.
Remarks:
- We used the 2.4 kernel (==2.4.27-2-386)
