Netboot via PXE
Netboot via PXE 2012-03-13 Tue
Some links
Some notes
To get this to work, you need…
- BIOS ROM that supports PXE
- True for most modern motherboards and/or NICs
- DHCP server
- To manage passing out configuration such as IP addresses and the next-server attribute.
- TFTP server
- With images
- ???
- It looks for images based on most-to-least specific configuration
- MAC address
- IP subnet
- Default
Some things PXE doesn’t support
It was created as a standard in 1999, and hasn’t been updated much since, so there are things that postdate it, and that are thus not supported.
- WIFI
- Likely to be troublesome anyways, as you surely want some authentication to get onto a WIFI network
- IPv6
- It wasn’t clear that it yet mattered in 1999…
- DNS
- It works with IP addresses only
DHCP discussion
- Go look for next-server attribute
- Some discussion of handling sharing subnets across a redundant set of DHCP servers
More worth looking at
- Inquisitor
- OSS hardware testing tool that’s better than memtest
- gPXE
- OSS bootloader
- Supports DNS, so can forward requests broadly potentially anywhere
- Can transfer data across additional protocols, such as HTTP, HTTPS, SAN (iSCSI, AoE)
- Can support WIFI
- Possibly IPv6