[SLUG] Floppy FW (Asked and answered)

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Sun Aug 12 2001 - 03:48:36 EDT


QUESTION:

Trying to create the floppyfw distro for my firewall, and running into a
slight problem. I don't believe the NICs will auto-sense (I always
specify IRQs and I/O addresses). Floppyfw starts with syslinux, and uses
the syslinux.cfg to configure itself. The following line appears in that
file:

append initrd=initrd.gz root=/dev/fd0 ether=0,0,0,eth0 ether=0,0,0,eth1

That little bit on the end about the ethers is where I need to put the
IO and IRQ data, but I'm danged if I can find documentation on how to
phrase it so syslinux likes it. The syslinux docs say that the append
lines are same as lilo. Great. Lilo's docs aren't any better on this
score.

The lines in my normal conf.modules on that PC (currently residing on
the hard drive) are:

alias eth0 ne
alias eth1 ne
options ne io=0x300,0x320 irq=10,3

(No, I can't put this in conf.modules on the floppy, because it's
compressed and only gets uncompressed into ramdisk, so there's no
editing it, realistically.)

How do I make syslinux understand this?

ANSWER:

Before sending this, I checked a couple more things, and found
the answer in man 7 bootparam. So if you every want to feed options to
lilo or initrd, the bootparam man page is where you find what they are
and how to specify them.

In this specific case, the "ether" parts of the lines above would be:

ether=10,0x300,eth0 ether=3,0x320,eth1

The man pages are your friend, even if they are a pain in the rump.

Paul



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