[OmniOS-discuss] Help setting up a boot server

[Natxo Asenjo]

On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 10:44 AM, Michael Mounteney <gate03 at landcroft.co.uk>
wrote:

> Hello, I would appreciate some advice in setting-up a boot server.
> This would have OmniOS as the server and a couple of diskless HP thin
> clients running Linux as the clients.
>
> The Linux kernel is already configured as a diskless NFS root client
> but it is currently loaded from a small partition on the thin client's
> flash ROM.  I'd like to move it entirely onto the server.
>
> As I understand it, the server must run a TFTP server and as that
> communicates via UDP/IP, a DHCP server is also required.  Presumably
> the best thing is to configure the DHCP server to serve a fixed IP
> address to the client's MAC address, so that the Linux kernel can also
> use DHCP to get the (same) IP address.  Currently, the IP address is
> set in the arguments passed to the kernel.
>
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Diskless_nodes#About_Etherboot says that
> the served-up client kernel must be prepared with etherboot.
>
> So a few random musings.  Any thoughts ?  Best server-side software ?
> where there's a choice.
>

all the pieces are there I think. Recently the isc-dhcp server got into the
packages if I remember correctly and there is a tftp package as well..

If you want fixed ip addresses you can achieve that using reservations in
dhcp. The rest is pretty trivial.

My notes for configuring the tftp service in omnios:

pkg install tftp

echo "tftp dgram udp wait root /usr/sbin/in.tftpd in.tftpd -s /tftpboot" >
/tmp/tftp.inetd
svcadm enable inetd
inetconv -i /tmp/tftp.inetd -o /tmp
svccfg import /tmp/tftp-udp.xml
svcadm restart tftp/udp

will give you a working tftp service with the tftp root in /tftpboot.

I have never used etherboot and doubt that you need it, but you should know
that better ;-)

And lastly you will need an nfs share for the diskless clients, but that is
pretty simple as well.

-- 
groet,
natxo
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