Replies: 2 comments 6 replies
|
Yes, that's a sensible overall goal. You don't need a standalone GRUB EFI to be involved. A minimal boot flow would be something like: UEFI HTTP Boot -> iPXE -> Boot directly from iSCSI disk The kernel+initrd can be present in the usual way within the iSCSI disk image: you don't need to pull these out and load them separately via HTTP. (You can do that if you want, but it just makes things more complicated.) To achieve this boot flow, the minimal setup would be something like:
That should get you as far as booting a single diskless client from your iSCSI target. If it is a read-only disk (and the OS does not try to mount it read-write), then you can boot multiple clients from the same iSCSI target. |
|
Thank you very much for your response and your time. I’ll try to continue working from here and keep you posted. The client UEFI supports HTTP boot natively, and I can enter a static URL to my boot server. Fortunately, that means I don’t need the DHCP server. |
|
Do you happen to have any cohesive literature on this topic (iPXE + iSCSI) to recommend? |
|
Basic sanboot: https://ipxe.org/cmd/sanboot |
|
This doesn't use iPXE but should be informative on the overall logic of booting iSCSI and configuring the kernel to use iSCSI (if you need help with that): |
|
This is great. Thank you! |
This works now, but the client machine boots into grub command line. I therefore suspect that the image's original GRUB configuration isn't suitable for this type of boot. I don't want to dive into a detailed troubleshooting process just yet, but does anyone know how to configure GRUB (or the image in general) for that? |
|
Does grub say anything about why it didn't load it's configuration file? |
Uh oh!
There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.
Hello,
I'm trying to replace ~30 identical bootable Linux USB sticks with a centralized HTTP/iSCSI boot setup for laptops.
Current workflow idea:
UEFI HTTP Boot -> standalone GRUB EFI -> kernel/initrd over HTTP-> Linux mounts a remote iSCSI-backed raw disk image as root filesystem (read only).
The image is a normal Linux installation that currently works fine from USB media.
I’m looking for guidance/documentation/examples specifically about iSCSI in combination with iPXE. Does anyone know of any other relevant material on this topic?
Important constraints:
Does this overall architecture make sense, or is there a more standard approach for centrally hosted persistent Linux desktops over pure UEFI HTTP boot?
All reactions