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Diskless Booting For the Modern Age

Posted by timothy on from the who-needs-moving-parts dept.

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."

2 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. I haven't been wondering... by langelgjm · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I still use PXE to boot a diskless MythTV client. For a while I had the machine connected to a wireless router set up in bridge mode, so the machine effectively netbooted wirelessly.

    --
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  2. A few interesting things... by Junta · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The DHCPv6 netboot standard about to come out recommends http as the protocol of choice where tftp would have been used, but uses URLs so the protocol is selectable.

    The iSCSI portion of this is a wider standard, implemented by many firmware configurations out of the box.

    Finally, I'm going to plug xCAT as a tool to wrap dhcp, dns, ntp, active directory, gPXE, iSCSI, PXE, bootp/tftp, ipmi, blades, vmware, kvm, xen, LPARs, and more to deploy vmware, windows, linux, and aix systems and do hardware management. It mostly pays off at larger scale, but it is a project that aims to understand how to best utilize those various technologies.

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