Diskless Booting For the Modern Age

An anonymous reader writes "Ever wonder what happened to PXE? Intel's popular standard for diskless booting hasn't been updated since 1999, and has missed out on such revolutions as wireless Ethernet, cloud computing, and iSCSI. An open source project called Etherboot has been trying to drag PXE into the 21st century. One of their programmers explains how to set up diskless booting for your cloud, using copy-on-write to save space."

Comments

Re:Authentication

[rathaven]

It wasn't designed for it - PXE boots without authentication on the client so that the hardware gets the image thinly and then auth takes place when the OS is installed. It assumes control of the local LAN is in place and it is trusted. If you are looking for auth at this level you'd need to look at authentication to the switch or wireless on the network - pre-authentication using something like 802.1X. I'm not 100% clear but I believe gPXE has something that probably covers that in the docs as it has scripting capability pre-receiving DHCP addresses (at the level for wireless authentication and possibly 802.1X)...

Re:Cloud?

[fauxhemian]

It doesn't scale and isn't modular in a Unixy way. Modern applications just suck because they're so inflexible. Why can I do so many things from a little text terminal, but I can't easily script the behavior of my web browser without special add-ons?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbl

Re:How is it slow?

[Junta]

Issues:
-tftp multicast is inherently limited to smaller than 98MB images with sane MTU. The same block number wrapping in unicast can't work in multicast. When you want speedup the most, tftp multicast can't even work
-multicast only buys you something if a large number of clients are acquiring the same payload at the same time. In a large scale 'cloud 'configuration, things are generally heterogenous enough to negate any such hypothetical benefit.
-Most ethernet fabrics are either incapable or not configured for IGMP/MLDv2 snooping required to properly scope multicast resulting in all multicast traffic degrading to broadcast. This has very adverse results unless every entity on the network only cares about the transfer.