31–40 of 68 posts
This is neat. It’s like Mac internet recovery mode but for everybody else
This project looks neat. I boot well over 10,000 blade computers that don't have onboard storage, with iPXE. Kind of amazing technology. Had to develop our own super minimal Ubuntu distro though. Used a hacked up version of debirf to do it. Not sure this project offers what I need, which is a less hacked up version of debirf.
Can you elaborate, why you chose Ubuntu? Alpine with lbu[0] seems like a perfect fit and looks IMHO less experimental. Also you can provide backups straight via iPXE[1]. Nonetheless, kudos for the slim ubuntu image :) [0]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_local_backup [1]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/PXE_boot
There are some issues with this, but overall it works ok. For now, it is just what I ended up with. Total boot download is about 100megs, which isn't too bad... machine is up and running in 60s, which is fine for this workload right now. It does suck rebooting the whole datacenter at once though. ;-)
The lbu stuff looks interesting for sure. I'm not a huge fan of the additional NFS requirement, but I assume that can be worked around. That said, I'm open to changing stuff up and optimizing things further. This is some esoteric stuff and we are hiring. =)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate, why you chose Ubuntu? Alpine with lbu[0] seems like a perfect fit and looks IMHO less experimental. Also you can provide backups straight via iPXE[1]. Nonetheless, kudos for the slim ubuntu image :) [0]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_local_backup [1]: https://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/PXE_boot
Why Ubuntu? Mostly because it just makes packaging and compatibility easier. There is a plugin system which creates tarballs out of overlays... so you can add additional software into the system and the building of the tarballs can include things like apt install. These tarballs get downloaded and installed early on by a hacked init script. This way, we can do things like install minimized downloads of GPU drivers. T…
This is sort-of cool, I guess, but also very much not what you would want to do? I mean, people agitate against `curl blah.xyz | sh` for a reason. And this, by any measure, is much worse. Also: 'By default iPXE does not compile in HTTPS support'
https://github.com/OpenNetworkingFoundation/ipxe-build/blob/...
(link is to a repo I worked on that uses Docker to build iPXE with various options enabled, and also embed mTLS certs)
The docs don't explain much.[0] I tried running the Docker container and couldn't figure out what to do with it. I didn't see a way of uploading new images to it, and I didn't know how to refer to the netboot.xyz container as a PXE target.
Has anyone found a good guide on how to use netboot.xyz? Is netboot.xyz capable of doing what I want? (i.e., I load different Raspberry Pi OS images onto netboot.xyz in a VM/Docker container, and then I point my Pi to network boot from the netboot.xyz server, and netboot.xyz serves the Pi the OS image I want). The Pi natively supports network booting[1], but I don't know if I'm putting the right pieces together.
[0] https://netboot.xyz/docs/quick-start
[1] https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr...
I haven’t needed to do recovery disks, boot drives, rescue operations etc in so long. Back then it felt like I’d need to every few weeks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why a serious user sets up their own server, serves the images that they have selected and checked, and doesn't serve outside of their known netspace.
I did that for a while but keeping images up to date was a chore I’d often forget to do then regret not doing once I needed it. Sure I could probably automate it with a little effort but instead I switched to this service and have been running with it for a few years now without any issues. While I know there is a risk involved, pragmatically that risk is very low given I’m just an anonymous individual very occasiona…
These with even relatively dated 'netinstall' media can provide you with current installations. Then provide you with super fast updates.
I'm more familiar with doing this with RPM based distributions -- CentOS, Fedora, etc. It's basically a web server and rsync behind a [parameterized] systemd timer so you can centrally control existing/new mirrors
The results can admittedly be a little funny. If the netinstall is so far behind that RPM doesn't know what to do with the new packages, then yea - time to get a new one :)
I was looking into netboot.xyz recently, as I do Raspberry Pi development. I'd love to be able to just run a VM that lets me load a few different Raspberry Pi OS images and choose which one I want the Pi to boot into on next reboot. netboot.xyz seemed promising, but I couldn't figure out how to use it. The docs don't explain much.[0] I tried running the Docker container and couldn't figure out what to do with it. I d…
I was looking into netboot.xyz recently, as I do Raspberry Pi development. I'd love to be able to just run a VM that lets me load a few different Raspberry Pi OS images and choose which one I want the Pi to boot into on next reboot. netboot.xyz seemed promising, but I couldn't figure out how to use it. The docs don't explain much.[0] I tried running the Docker container and couldn't figure out what to do with it. I d…