Be aware that configuring two DHCP-servers in one network will certainly cause issues so check if your current network doesn’t have a DHCP-server running yet. Knowing the above, we need to start with setting up a DHCP server that will give network information and the TFTP-server to our fresh machines. DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and is a protocol to automatically provide systems with an IP configuration (like IP address, netmask, default gateway, DNS-server) but it can also provide a TFTP-server IP for PXE booting. Since we would like to be able to boot machines which are completely new and do not want to preconfigure them with a network configuration, DHCP is what we need. In order for the PXE boot to connect to the network, the computer needs an IP configuration. In an enterprise environment you’ll probably have these on a separate machine. I’ll configure DHCP and TFTP on the same machine. Fortunately that’s all we need.įor this post and tutorial, I’ll use a minimal CentOS 7 installation to run as PXE boot server but the configuration files should be compatible with most other Linux distributions. All that PXE can do is read files over TFTP into the memory and execute them. It’s a small environment, launched before the actual operation system boot that is quite limited in functionality.
PXE stands for Preboot Execution Environment. In this post I’ll explain how to setup such a PXE boot server that is able to provide multiple Linux distribution installations for deployment over the network. Booting your installations from the network, using a PXE boot server, makes life a lot easier and isn’t very hard to setup. Especially if you want to keep them current or customize them you’ll end up with a whole lot of discs. When regularly installing Linux hosts or VM’s, it easily becomes annoying to constantly burn CD’s/DVD’s or mount ISO’s for all the Linux distributions that you want to deploy.
0 kommentar(er)
