On 02.03.2016 23:24, David C. Rankin wrote:

All,

Hi!

I was interested in setting up a boot server to provide Arch install, as well as several other boot/setup options. I have existing Arch servers with ISC dhcpd, apache, vsftpd, and I've installed tftp. I have looked at:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PXE

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Diskless_system

Both seem to have different pieces of the puzzle. The PXE page provides examples for use of dnsmasq, darktable, and tftp. However running dnsmasq would conflict with the existing ISC dhcp service and how would xinetd know how to differential between an ftp request that should invoke tftp or vsftp?

tftpd speaks tftp, vsftpd speaks ftp, these are two different protocols, both daemons run on different ports

The Diskless_system page, uses existing dhcp config, but then pulls files from NFS or NBD.

I've looked at dozens of ubuntu and centos pages (which is primarily what you get when you search for PXE boot setup howtos), but most are of such poor quality, it is hard to tell what the salient parts of the setup are.

My confusion comes in seeing how I can continue to serve the rest of my dhcp clients and also PXE boot requests (from what I can tell, it shouldn't matter, everybody still gets an address, and those non-PXE clients should ignore the additions to dhcpd.conf -- hopefully)

to enable PXE boot, you need to specifiy a next-server and a filename in the dhcpd.conf. you can set them on a global level or only for specific NIC vendors or subnets or whatever. However, no client will get that if they never boot from their network card. example is here: https://gist.github.com/bastelfreak/dbd2e1a523702598f75c

Additionally, all other howtos show mounting the .iso loop and then copying the files to the tftpboot location. Why bother with the copy, why not just mount the .iso loop at the proper tftpboot location?

I've got a script collection which builds a customized ISO, you can find that here: https://github.com/virtapi/LARS/ there is also a script that automatically extracts the ISO: https://github.com/virtapi/LARS/blob/master/ext/extract_archiso.sh

If anyone know the answer to whether the PXE config additions to dhcpd.conf will conflict with normal dhcp clients? or whether having both tftp and vsftp served by xinetd is an issue? I would appreciate your answer. I think I can take

I would not use xinted but run them standalone or through systemd, but just a personal opinion. your setup will also work.

if from there. If you have any other pointers about setting up a PXE boot server with this configuration I'd appreciate that as well.

You may want to check the README.md in these 4 projects, they describe how you build your setup (and a bit more): https://github.com/virtapi I'm always reachable as bastelfreak in #archlinux.de, just let me know if you've got any question. I built probably the exact setup you want a few days back.

I'll add whatever working solution is arrived at to the wiki. Thanks