TUT291b: Installing OES-NW on HP Blades

..without resorting to PXE. A practical guide.

Since TUT291 at Brainshare was all about installing OES-Linux onto HP blades, those of us who have to do it with a NetWare kernel are somewhat left out in the dark. This is a guide to how I managed to get it to work. The process will give you an image you can use to set up Netware from Deployment Manager.

Needed:

• ILO with Advanced Pack. HP has cunningly selected the feature set of ILO in the blades such that you can't manage multiple blades without the Advanced Pack, so you probably already have this if you have blades. The Advanced Pack is, of course, an additional license you need to pay. All the vendors are doing this, so this isn't a surprise.
  
• A workstation on the same LAN (i.e. no WAN links) as the blade you are installing to.
• A small, knoppix-based ISO-Linux on CD. I like Insert.

The preparation phase of this is pretty minor, but needed.

1. Create a pair of .zip (or better yet, .tgz) archives that contain all of the PROD and OS disks. If you have the DVD, this makes it easier. Just copy the whole DVD to the archive.
2. Have your ISO-Linux on CD.
3. Have the OS-disk from the NetWare install on CD/DVD.

Now to get going.

1. Start with a blank blade.
2. Go into the blade's ILO
3. Insert your NW65OS disk into your own CD Rom drive
4. Go to the ILO's Virtual Media tab, and attach your CD-Rom drive to the Blade.
5. Start up the blade
6. Go through the first steps of setting up a Netware server, but cancel out when it asks for a PSM to load.
1. You could theoretically do the entire install from here, but you'd get more grey hair than you'd want. This procedure will save you time if you have to do more than one Netware install.
2. This gives you a DOS partition to install from, and one that Novell knows works.
   
7. Detach the CD-Rom from ILO, and reboot the blade
8. In DOS, go into FDISK. Create a D: drive sized about 1.5GB
9. Reboot, format D:
10. Reboot. Put the ISO-Linux CD in your drive, and attach it by way of ILO. This should cause it to boot from CD. Go into text-mode if you can, it'll save time.
11. I haven't found a CD distro that'll auto-detect the SmartArray, so you'll have to make the device yourself, and mount it.
1. cat /proc/partitions
2. One of the lines should read something like "cciss/c0dop5", which corresponds with a theoretical partition-5 on a SCSI drive. This is the D: drive you created.
3. mknod /dev/hphome b 104 5
1. This creates the /dev record needed to mount. 104 is the major number, and 5 is the minor number, both of which are given in the "/proc/partitions" output
   
4. mount /dev/hphome /mnt/hd
1. This mounts the drive where we can use it
12. Retrieve the OS and PROD archives, and expand them onto /mnt/hd.
1. example: "unzip -o /ramdisk/nw65prod.zip"
2. example: "tar -xvvzf /ramdisk/nw65prod.tar.gz"
3. What this does is copy the contents of the archive to the D: drive. Sneaky, eh?
13. Once both archives are copied, reboot, detach the CD-Rom, and go into DR-DOS to verify things look right. If everything worked, you should have a D:\ with a complete NetWare 6.5 source directory in it.
14. If everything looks right, image the server from Deployment Manager and use it to install other NetWare servers.