Forming Idea: PiXE Dust
Have a look at this image:
This is an interesting systems admin project to formalise a way to package PXE booting installations so that they could be set up very easily just by installing a deb package and maybe some tools for unpacking squashfs cds and allow for kickseed/preseed to be configured in an easy way.
I have most of this working with scripts and such and it’s a matter of making it pretty and packaging it up and posting to a PPA to try and get some others to test such a system. The idea on my part is to remove the job of managing netboots at community centers which manage their client and “oem” installs.
Your ideas?
Tags: boot, cd, netboot, pxe, Ubuntu
i’d love to see an apple style ‘target disk mode’ initrd, that allows the pxe host to access the client’s disks via NBD/iscsi
Great stuff. Would be really neat if one could drop Ubuntu ISOs into this to easily try them on other machines. It’s possible today but requires lots of manual fiddling with syslinux files and NFS and so on.
Someone used to do an “Ubuntu on Tap” similar to this: http://www.ucc.asn.au/services/ubuntu.ucc
One thing that would be cool would be a Live CD/DVD that you can give a LoCo that they can live boot into and it just offers PXE installs OOTB so you can do quick installfests.
This would be a great idea. It would make a sysadmin’s job a lot easier if there was an option to reinstall the os via pxe boot. It would be great if it could be generic enough to allow any iso to be booted off like it was a local cd.
However, I think it would be great it if did support preseeding so that a user could reinstall the os without being asked questions. (For instance allow an ubuntu desktop to be configured to use nfs/ cfs and ldap/samba for authentication).
This is something I hope to do in the future.
one more thing might be an option to automatically pick the iso / setup based on the mac address of the system talking to the pxe boot server. That way you could make some custom installs for users.
This is a great idea. I do network installs all the time, but always assumed that anyone who wanted such a thing would have the skills to set one up, since not THAT much is required. I realized that wasn’t true when a blogger at ZDNet said he wanted to be able to boot up, choose an OS from a list, and install that over the network.
I think you’ve got a winner here. Look at what Edubuntu has already done for LiveDC LTSP environments. Maybe you can leverage that.
di-netboot-assistant helps in downloading the netboot images at least, though it does not auto configure the tftp/dhcp servers.