[arch-releng] PXEboot + unattended install

[Greg Sutcliffe]

On 20 November 2011 19:46, Dieter Plaetinck <dieter at plaetinck.be> wrote:
> On Sun, 20 Nov 2011 21:38:25 +0200
> Jesse Jaara <jesse.jaara at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> There is also archiso-pxe something ... script in aur wich will set up pxe
>> and uses nbd to mount the ISO over lan
>
> Right, archiso-pxe-server, that's the thing Greg should be looking at.
> https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Archiso_as_pxe_server
> It's written by Gerardo, who did also most or even all of the related work in archiso.
> it uses NBD (which is surprisingly simple to set up).
> I believe I once set this up and was very easy and worked nicely.
> (unless you already have a dnsmasq that should stay up, last time i checked this script invoked a new dnsmasq instance with some custom settings, which could give issues if you already use dnsmasq)

Indeed, I already have dhcpd and bind9 running on the installation
server, as custom pxe config files are written per mac address (one of
the best features of pxelinux). I suppose the best way forward is to
look at setting nbd - I agree it looks very easy. Looking at the
linked page, the archiso dnsmasq config is not specifying anything
special (just the location of the pxelinux.0 file) which is already in
my dhcpd configuration, so I probably just need to copy over the
pxelinux.cfg file and see what happens.

Thanks again guys - much material for me to work on :)