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We administer a small data-center and so far we were using netboot to run our images. The problem is that the system lives in RAM, and at the moment we need that extra space for our software to use.

We looked at xCat, but our image is a newer Ubuntu, which lacks proper support. There's also Warewulf, which does not allow writing the image to disk. iPXE also lacks support for writing the downloaded image to disk.

All solutions that we found download an installer image, which requires a reboot, and would trap us in a loop.

We also found this question that is similar and could be adapted (we prefer a ready-to-use solution): using Linux as a bootloader?

Is there a solution for this? Any tiny bootloader that can be iPXE-loaded to flash-and-boot the final network image?

Kokila R
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Caian
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1 Answers1

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iPXE is a boot loader which you can use to boot from network. It has powerful capabilities and you can script it to fit your requirement. Below is the example of booting a CentOS 8 installer configuration for iPXE.

#!ipxe

set protocol http
set server_ip 192.168.1.1
set httpboot http://${server_ip}
set tftpboot tftp://${server_ip}


:menu
menu iPXE boot menu
item centos81 Install CentOS 8.1 x64
choose os
goto ${os}


:centos81
echo Booting CentOS 8.1 Installer
set root-path ${httpboot}
kernel ${root-path}/c8/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz initrd=initrd.img ip=dhcp inst.repo=http://192.168.1.1/c8 devfs=nomount
initrd ${root-path}/c8/images/pxeboot/initrd.img initrd.img
boot || read void

References:

iBro X
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