• DebianLive
• Howto
• Creating_a_Test_environment

Ideal setup would duplicate mine. Thinkpad X40 with eth1, the wireless interface with Internet on an internal like 192.168.1.64.

The eth0, the wired NIC will serve as the netboot test server. The PXE (network boot) enabled client machine (the old COMPAQ) can be connected typically via a hub (actually a hub isn't required with a Thinkpad as it automagically crosses the cable for you) with patch cable.

eth0 will be setup like so:

iface eth0 inet static
    address 192.168.2.1
    netmask 255.255.255.0

The Debian installer is the authoritative guide for our setup: http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch04s06.html#dhcpd

Briefly we need the Debian packages dhcp3-server and tftpd-hpa.

/etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf

option domain-name "webconverger.com";

default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;

allow booting;
allow bootp;

# The next paragraph needs to be modified to fit your case
subnet 192.168.2.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
  range 192.168.2.200 192.168.2.253;
  option broadcast-address 192.168.2.255;
# the gateway address which can be different
# (access to the internet for instance)
  option routers 192.168.2.1;
# !!! CHANGE TO YOUR ISP DNS !!!
  option domain-name-servers 212.104.130.9;
}

group {
  next-server 192.168.2.1;
  host tftpclient {
# !!! CHANGE TO YOUR CLIENTS MAC ADDRESS !!!
  hardware ethernet  00:d0:b7:52:62:de;
  filename "pxelinux.0";
 }
}

tail /var/log/syslog to see what's going on with the services.

Copy tftpboot to the right place

monty$ ls /var/lib/tftpboot/
initrd.gz  memtest  pxelinux.0  pxelinux.cfg  vmlinuz

NFS setup

You need the package nfs-kernel-server. Attention: nfs-user-server does not work with netboot. Configuration should look like:

monty$ cat /etc/exports | grep -v ^#
/srv/debian-live *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
monty$ pwd
/srv/debian-live
monty$ ls
casper  doc  md5sum.txt  pics  README.html  README.mirrors.html  README.mirrors.txt  README.txt  tools

/srv/debian-live is the binary part of the generated net boot live image.

Sharing internet

As root:

iptables -t nat -F
iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth1 -j MASQUERADE

Finally: echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward or edit /etc/sysctl.conf