Booting debian via PXE and TFTP in to a ram disk...

ianclipclop · 04-23-2010, 04:41 PM

Hi,

I am struggling to do the following...

I want a debian server running dhcp/tftp/pxe containing a tarball of a 'client' debian installation.

I want a client that pxe boots, talks to the server, creates a ramdisk, untars the 'client' tarball to the ramdisk and boots into it. Once that's working, I want an NFS map back to the server for the users home directory.

Can't find any really helpful howto's... wondering if anyone on here has done this?

Thanks

jvaldivia · 04-24-2010, 01:25 AM

I install debian into an appliance using TFTP/PXE/DHCP from the server prespective and netboot options on the client side.

Maybe It can help you a little bit you can review what I've done here http://soad1982.blogspot.com/2009/06...kris-5501.html

tkmsr · 04-24-2010, 08:28 PM

Can you tell what steps you did to do that so that we may point out the errors.
Are you doing it for the first time ?
You need atftp package also.
If that is the case then you need to have following setup
1) Apache server or FTP which will host your ISO.
2) TFTP that holds the kernel and ramdisk for PXE boot.
3) DHCP server running.
The following link are about Ubuntu but is helpful for Debian too.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PXEInstallServer
http://ubuntu-tutorials.com/2007/10/...installations/
http://www.howtoforge.com/setting-up...on-ubuntu-9.10
http://www.howtoforge.com/setting-up...n-debian-lenny