Archy's Blog

This is a follow up on my previous post  in which I'm writing on how to set up a pxe-server on CentOS 7.4. But since I do not only want CentOS being pxe-bootable, I'll also add Ubuntu to the mix. So here is what I did to be able to boot Ubuntu 16.04 via pxe: Setting up the directory for pxe-booting [archy@pxe-server ~]$ mkdir /var/lib/tftpboot/ubuntu1604 Downloading the ubuntu-netboot archive and extract the necessary files to the boot-directory: [archy@pxe-server ~]$ wget http://cz.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/xenial/main/installer-amd64/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz [archy@pxe-server ~]$ tar -xzf netboot.tar.gz [archy@pxe-server ~]$ sudo cp ubuntu-installer/amd64/{initrd.gz,linux} /var/lib/tftpboot/ubuntu1604 Now it's time to edit the pxelinux.cfg/default file. Add the following entry for ubuntu: sudo vim /var/lib/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default label 4 menu label ^4) Install Ubuntu 16.04 kernel ubuntu1604/linux append initr...

Setting up a PXE server can be very usefull in home and enterprise networks, whether you want to provision a bunch of machines or just be lazy when it comes to OS installations (kickstart is your friend). For this setup, I'm using a fully up-to-date CentOS 7 installation. For making PXE possible, we need a few services which we can install by running the following command: [archy@pxe-server ~]$ sudo yum -y install dhcp syslinux tftp-server nfs-utils I think most of them are pretty self explanatory. Syslinux is a bunch of bootloaders for network-booting. When everything is installed, let's dig in to the configuration. First up, the dhcp-config, I'll configure a simple subnet. [archy@pxe-server ~]$ sudo vim /etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf subnet 172.31.10.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { range 172.31.10.100 172.31.10.200; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; # my 2 ipa-servers as dns ... option domain-name-servers 172.31.10.250, 172.31.10.251; ...