Almost diskless boot from a web server.

Gpxe is a step above the orginal etherboot format.

This is instructable if for advanced computer administration users. If you want to try this please get a trained linux administrator to help you. Traditionally if you wanted to do diskless booting, you would have to set up a tftp server and modify your dhcp server to deal with diskless booting. The could be a real hassle. With gpxe all you have to have is the normal dhcp server and a web server. Now you can virtually boot a machine without an operating system anywhere in the world if you web server was accessible. This is great for doing operating system installs or using virtual live cd's. Another advantage of this is that you can still use a machine that is either diskless and or has a dead drive. An excellent way to keep downtime at a minimum.

Note: if you have a gpxe compatible network interface card or a machine with a built in nic that supports gpxe, you can boot diskless to a web server.

Update: Ipxe has now replaced gpxe.

Step 1 Upload the disk image to the web server.

You will want to upload the disk image you want to use for your remove boot. Usually a boot image for an install is what we use. You can get these files from your linux distro's server.

You may have to modify you menu.cfg depending on the version of linux. mine is set up for two different boot images. menu.cfg allows you to choose at boot time which image to use.


menu.cfg
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


PROMPT 0
ALLOWOPTIONS 0
MENU ROWS 6

MENU TITLE PLEASE CHOSE A SYSTEM TO BOOT

LABEL -
MENU LABEL NETBOOT
MENU DISABLE
LABEL SuSe
MENU LABEL ^1 SUSE
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL vmlinuz-suse
APPEND ro root=/dev/hda1 initrd=initrd-suse.img

MENU SEPARATOR

LABEL -
MENU LABEL DEBIAN
MENU DISABLE
LABEL DEBIAN
MENU LABEL ^1 DEBIAN
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL vmlinuz-debian
APPEND ro root=/dev/hda1 initrd=initrd-debian.img

LABEL UBUNTU
MENU LABEL ^2 UBUNTU
MENU INDENT 1
KERNEL vmlinuz-ubuntu
APPEND ro root=/dev/hda1 initrd=initrd-ubuntu.img