[arch-releng] PXEboot + unattended install

[Greg Sutcliffe]

On 20 November 2011 19:35, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
>> Greg Sutcliffe <greg.sutcliffe at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Indeed, I'm looking into gPXE to boot from an http-served iso.
>> > Hopefully that will scale better...
>>
>> I don't know what you intend to achieve but you cannot do random seeks over http, so it will still download the entire iso file.
>> Have a good look at archiso, maybe it has some optimizations for pxe.

Indeed, but tftp has limitations that http does not, and is (from what
I've read) generally faster than tftp - so even though it downloads
the entire file, it should be faster.

> well, apparently you can: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_serving
> still, i wonder how you would actually go about it in practice. and what kind of latencies to expect.

Oh, that's interesting. Not what I was trying to achieve, but I might
have a play once I've got something basic working.

I'll definitely take a closer look at archiso once I've understood the
basics. If a simple tftp- or http-served iso, plus aif script, works
then I'll have a baseline to compare with.