I decided it was time to place a PXE boot install image on my network for installing Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid desktops. For the most part everything went as expected (see this post) but during the install I got an error that "restricted/binary-amd64/Packages was corrupt".

It turns out there are no restricted packages on the alternate installer image, and the lack of an empty "Packages" file at "/dists/lucid/restricted/binary-amd64" where the networked install image is located was causing it to bomb.

Simply doing

touch Packages

in that shared directory within the install image seems to have fixed the issue. For some reason the fact that the Packages.gz ungzips into a zero byte file was throwing it, but having an already existing zero byte file seemed to fix it.

If you are trying to run an enterprise in Linux, one of the key components needed is a way to automatically deploy and configure Linux on the desktop. With this you can also make a memory test utility available over the network.

Enter LinuxPXE.

With LinuxPXE and Ubuntu you can easily push desktop installs out over the network to computers without CD drives, and have it preconfigure most of your common settings.

You'll need the following components on a server:

tftpd-hpa  (TFTP Server)
A DHCP Server
An Ubuntu Jaunty Alternate CD ISO Image file

Notice I said "tftpd-hpa" - the openbsd-tftpd server will not work for this.

You'll also need an Ubuntu Jaunty desktop with:

system-config-kickstart

I'm going to assume a rather high level of network design knowledge in this and not tell you silly things like "you can only have one DHCP server on the network at a time" - wait, I just told you that. Anyway, if you aren't already familiar with configuring an Enterprise grade network then this may go a bit fast for you.

TFTP

First, configure your TFTP server. You must edit /etc/default/tftpd-hpa to enable it:

#Defaults for tftpd-hpa
RUN_DAEMON="yes"
OPTIONS="-l -s /var/lib/tftpboot"

Now start it with: