[arch-releng] PXEboot + unattended install

[Greg Sutcliffe]

On 20 November 2011 18:28, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
> AFAIK archiso images boot fine over pxe. (archboot is not official)
> archboot doesn't even use aif, but archiso does, and it accepts a 'script' boot parameter,
> which can do whatever you want, such as starting an aif automatic install.
> at least, that's how I remember things are.  I didn't ever try this myself but IIRC other people have.
>
> Dieter

Thanks for the fast reply Dieter. I was trying to avoid passing an
entire iso over TFTP - my internal virtual network takes long enough
just to pass the 80Mb initrd from archboot. I'll test it anyway (the
netinst iso is only double that, not too bad), just so I've got a
handle on how it works - thanks for the tip.

Are there plans to integrate archboot and the main iso images (or aif)
in some way? It feels odd that Arch is such a great minimalist distro
once installed, but a 150Mb iso is needed to pxeboot it - when other,
less clean, distros can pxeboot from the order of a 10-20Mb initrd. In
all honesty though, I have no idea how much work that would be - it's
been a few years since I last had to build my own initrds for
pxebooting, and that was for RedHat 7.3 :)

Thanks again for the heads up,
Greg