[BozemanLUG] Presentations I'd like to see - Anyone?

[Rusty Conover]

>
> Perhaps.  I know that PXE boot is used for imaging and new machine  
> installs... so if that is what you are using, please share.  Another  
> usage I'm interested in learning about (to decide if it is an area I  
> should pursue) is stateless computing... aka diskless terminals...  
> like the LTSP.
>
> TYL,
> -- 
> Scott Dowdle
> 704 Church Street
> Belgrade, MT 59714
> (406)388-0827 [home]
> (406)994-3931 [work]
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Hi Scott,

For the new machine installs its really easy once you get the initial  
tools in place.

The solution is a mix of DHCP, TFTP, and NFS or you could use HTTP.

You need a DHCP server to hand out the addresses on the network, thats  
pretty straight forward.  Be careful that you just setup your DHCP to  
only run for your local network, don't let it service requests coming  
in from your cable modem for instance, that would be bad.  You also  
need to setup DHCP to pass a filename of a bootloader and a TFTP  
server address.

Which is all pretty simple its just two lines in your dhcpd.conf:

	next-server 1.2.3.4;   # this is the address of the TFTP serve
         filename "/pxelinux.0"; # this is the filename of the boot  
loader

TFTP is the process that sends the files images to the PXE machine,  
the PXE ROM's aren't generally very smart thats why its not using FTP  
or HTTP.  This gPXE device looks interesting because it's a lot more  
full featured, iSCSI sounds pretty neat.  Continuing the process, the  
PXE machine gets the address of the TFTP server and downloads its boot  
loader.   Normally I just use pxelinux which goes out and searches  
files on the TFTP server to see what it should do next, here is where  
you can setup your TFTP server to pass back different kernels and boot  
parameters for for different MAC addresses.

See here for more pxelinux info:

http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php

Once you either enter the kernel name or accept the default, its  
really all hands off from there. The kernel is downloaded to the  
machine and to the untrained eye, it looks as if it was either loaded  
off of the disk or DVD. In my common case I just tell the installer  
about my kickstart file in the boot parameters and it proceeds on its  
way without any further attention needed.

So when a new version of Fedora comes out all I do it Bittorrent the  
DVD ISO, mount it via loopback and export the packages via NFS.  Copy  
the vmlinuz, and initrd.img to /tftpboot and its ready to go.

I personally haven't tried running a machine without a local disk  
based root, but I can't imagine it would be too painful.  I just don't  
know if things like POSIX file locking and memory mapping are  
completely rock solid over NFS based root filesystems.

Cheers,

Rusty
--
Rusty Conover
InfoGears Inc.
Phone: 406-587-5432
http://www.infogears.com






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