[wplug] PXE Netboot
Brian A. Seklecki
lavalamp at spiritual-machines.org
Fri Dec 5 08:18:06 EST 2008
On Sun, 2008-11-02 at 17:16 -0500, Roland Hess wrote:
> For a personal project, I'm trying to learn netbooting via PXE (using
> DHCP on the server side, not BOOTP). My eventual goal is to be able to
> netboot machines into a live (non-HD installed) Ubuntu server
It takes about a 5 minutes to setup on FreeBSD, less on NetBSD where the
bootloader isn't insane.
You flick on TFTP daemon, DHCP, and NFS server.
Hardware gets a DHCP address lease; Lease tells it where to TFTP its
stage 1 & stage 2 x86 boot loader. PXE code on the NIC TFTPs it down
and hands it to the BIOS for boot.
Stage 1 loader has sufficient NFS capabilities to mount the root file
system and load the kernel.
After that, you've got the 30-year old debate on how to split a POSIX
file system across network and local resources.
I recommend killing yourself and/or avoiding UDP NFS on gigabit
Ethernet.
~BAS
More information about the wplug
mailing list