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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."
TFTP over UDP on a LAN, doesn't seem slow at all. It's stupid, but sufficient to bootstrap a small kernel to access the real meat of your OS. 1-10MB TFTP downloads over 100mbit is no big deal. You can't get good 1gbit performance (let alone 10gbit) out of the dumb drivers in a PXE boot ROM, but that's OK.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The one thing missing from PXE is authentication: A PXE system will accept any DHCP address and with it any boot server configuration. Without cryptographic boot image authentication, network security is the Achilles' heel of PXE.
i am using pxe often.
i have setup a few linux install "CDs" for network install, a few live CDs for an emergency OS. LTSP is using it too and a small intel atom box gets its kernel over tftp/pxe... the pxe provides the parameters for the nfsroot mount. :) :)
old win2k netinstall for ppl without a RIS uses that system too
the tftpd box that provides all that stuff is a small amd geode that is normally my router
i often thought about making a sourceforge project out of it.... :)
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.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Good grief, everything is a "cloud" now. Have some servers on a rack? Those aren't servers, that's a cloud! It's like some retards took a Cisco networking diagram, and went crazy when they realized that everything could be simplified into one of the "clouds".
Warning / Rant: The last 5 years of computing have been pretty lame. Concurrency and solutions to it using functional high-level languages are the future. That's where we should have been five years ago when it was so obvious that chips with large numbers of cores were the future. These cloud solutions are just a stupid name for the same old monolithic crap. 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? Why aren't modern applications flexible like this, with simple interfaces for communicating with other programs? Where is the equivalent of a shell pipe, in modern applications? It's like somebody threw away all the lessons of the past, and said "But this is the new way, we don't need the old way, because this is new." Fuck that, computing should be better than this. It should be better than these stupid clouds and old piece-of-shit reinvent-the-wheel C and C++ programs with buffer overflows and other ancient problems. Or the HTML / Javascript / whatever jerry-rigged "web applications" that run on some opaque "cloud" that a random company has. Why is it that languages like Smalltalk and Lisp have been around for so long, and nobody learns from them or uses them? It's like the chips keep getting faster and faster, and people keep getting dumber and dumber.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
We do this at work - we chain-load gPXE using PXE and then use that to iSCSI boot from a Linux SAN which uses LVM COW snapshots. It's pretty good - the etherboot project rocks! We've been doing it for a while but it always gives me a kick when I type something at the commandline which wakes up a machine using IPMI & then boots it off some SAN volume
Global symbol "$deity" requires explicit package name at line 2. - If only $scripture started "use strict;"
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.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
naturally laugh at the mere suggestion of dickless booting.