Netboot

We have a PXEboot setup running on the Adminstuff VM on Equipment/Landin, it provides:

• Diskless i386 and amd64 Debian wheezy operation
• Rescue and Install for Debian wheezy and Debian Jessie
• Automatic install with London Hackspace tweaks/enhancements for Debian wheezy amd64 Warning - automatically formats disks!
• Partition Magic
• Memtest86
• DBAN - Darik's Burn and Nuke - formats and zeros-out drives to a very strong standard.
• Voyage (a minimised Debian-derived Linux distribution that can run from readonly media) Warning : the Voyage auto install kernel will reformat things they are booted on without prompting.
• FreeDOS (but needs a little careful usage - great for loading BIOS/firmware updates on systems - be ready to reboot and NOT load HIMEM.SYS on modern systems and you'll likely be fine and can read USB sticks)

NFS

Run a few diskless NFS clients booted via PXE etc, unfortunately NFS doesn't work very well as of 2016. It may work well now that we've changed out the network and NFS server.

Related Links

• https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/ltib/2010-08/msg00103.html
• https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/nfs/nfsroot.txt

TODO

Maybe look at adopting this for NetBoot stuffs: Pantoufle ?