I am really becoming desperate here. Any help or advice will be appreciated:
I want to install Debian on a remote SuperMicro server to which I have only IPMI accesss. The server is not in my network and I cannot easily use anything except HTTP boot.
So I tried two things:
I uploaded netinst.iso of Buster on my web-server and set-up BIOS of the target server to corresponding URL. The server successfully downloaded that iso image and started the Installer. Soon, after several questions, the installer tried to find its own components on the CD-ROM...that basically does not exist. So it failed. I did not find any way to convince it to look elsewhere. This did not work.
As the next option, I tried to unpack the netboot.tar.gz package from the Debian website to the web server. Again, I pointed the server BIOS to the files grubx64.efi, bootnetx64.efi and to various combinations of their links across different subdir levels. I always ended up with the gub prompt without any menu or anything else. It seems that grub does not know where to look for its configuration.
I do not have access to the documentroot of the web server, I am just a user there. Neither I have any access to its logs. So I cannot know what is the server actually requesting and not receiving.
Is there any way I could install Debian stable only using HTTP boot? I am able to set the http URL of the loader explicitly, so I do not need to modify DHCP. The NIC receives correct IP address and has a full internet access. I cannot setup Windows share (to mount it in IPMI as a virtual cd-rom) as my firewall blocks it. Any hint, please? Thank you very much.
I somehow solved it at the end. However, it was more a workaround. I was unable to tell grub where to look for its own configuration file.
I managed to start the Java console remotely using IPMIView. That console has an option to mount an iso file as a virtual cd. I used the regular netinst image and it worked properly.
Just for the record, prior to my post and all the hassle with the http boot, I tried to use the remote Java console in the web-interface of the IPMI card and it did not start. So I anticipated that neither would work the Java console in IPMIView.
Anyway, it seems that the Debian installer is not quite http-boot ready yet.