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This page and its links are here to guide you on how to populate and boot network servers. The benefit of such an approach is that the netboot servers, like netboot clients, run the software directly on their hardware which means direct access to local resources. With netbooting you can populate servers from a single location in an extremely fast time. Netbooting a server is really no different than a regular client other than you may need to install a kernel such as bigmem to support some of the local system resources. No local hard drives are required unless desired for specific reasons.
Howto Sections
DebianLive/Howto/Network_Image_Server - Start here for more general information on setting up a Network Image Server.
Basic Server Concepts
DebianLive/Howto/Creating_a_Netboot_Image - Create a Netboot Image with plain or non compressed file system so you can chroot and tun in for your authentication and any other easy. Note: remember to include netbase in the packages since I have had to do this in the past.
DebianLive/Howto/Creating_a_Test_environment - Setup your netboot environment to match your location. Or alternatively you could pxeboot then use boot param fetch=URL but then you can not use plain file system.
Netboot Caching Server Example
- This information assumes that you have a filesystem.squashfs image for clients in a NFS shared folder.
- On your netboot server, share via NFS the folder containing the client filesystem.squashfs
- Create a netboot image for caching servers which mounts the client NFS share from the netboot server and has apache installed and configured to share the NFS mount via http.
Netboot your caching servers and on your clients pxe setup add the boot parameter file=http://url.caching.server/filesystem.squashfs