Major nifty feature addition in this release: boot other TRKs over the network from a running TRK!
Yes indeed, after months of research, hard brainwork and lots of trial and error I finally got it to work: you can now boot a TRK from CD or USB stick and then boot other machines over PXE without any change to your network environment (no dhcp modifications, no resident tftp nor nfs server)
How does it work?
Well, the initial bootprinciple is similar to Microsoft RIS or Novell Zenworks network boot.
Thanks to a long existing patch from Michael Johnston for the ISC dhcp server, this dhcp is able to act as a proxy dhcp server. In short it means that when a PXE client receives boot parameters from a dhcp server like an ip-address but no PXE information, it broadcasts for the presence of a proxy dhcp server that could provide it with additional information like the location of a PXE server.
The built-in PXE server from this ISC dhcp then responds with parameters about a TFTP server and a bootfilename.
Next, the client gets its bootfile from the TFTP server, which is also running on TRK and boots the TRK kernel.
The "TRK server" is also acting as an nfs server so TRK can also run the second bootstage.
And there you have it: a perfect running copy of TRK without touching anything on your network or the need for an external bootmedia on your client.
Just give it a try: it ‘s the next option after the default in the bootmenu. Or just launch the command ‘trkbootnet’ after startup. Just make sure then you didn ‘t boot from ram, because it needs the original files on the startup medium to launch.
Next, there are a few bugfixes:
-Biggest bugfix is the fact that on many computers mountallfs just hung. Apparently it was the kernel built-in ntfs driver that freezed. Removing the write capabilities on this driver should solve the issue. Since ntfs-3g does a much better write handling than the built-in ntfs, there was no need for this anymore, except that winpass still used this method to write back registry hives. Winpass has been adapted and now uses ntfs-3g to write the hives.
-Another fix is for USB bootable TRKs. On certain volumes it refused to read the volume label because it stated the volume was dirty. I added a parameter to ignore the dirty state so TRK can continue.
-Third minor bugfix is in virusscan, where F-prot shouldn’t get redownloaded again if already present.
More bugfixes are yet to come, especially the virusscan script will get a complete overhaul.
I hope next kernel releases get more stable because I get more and more bugreports that weren ‘t there in previous kernels.
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