I wanted to set up a completely disk less boot. I want this for multiple reasons the biggest of which it is really freaking awesome. The other reason is to give an easy and always working recovery option - any computer could boot from this network image. As long as I keep all the drivers and not try to optimize the kernel I could boot pretty much any comptuer from the network and have it boot up my media center, or anything else. One goal is to go to a disk less very thin media center pc so I can get rid of the cool but always troublesome multiseating and start using the nvidia drivers and get much better graphics etc... There are plenty of other reasons but onto how to do it.
To boot into iscsi there are supposedly LAN cards that can do it nativly, supposedly mine can do it however I didn't use the native boot (I think). To tell the truth I only think I know what is going on with this boot process however I am most likely completely wrong but it works...
I think I use gPXE to chainload a PXE boot into a iSCSI boot rom that boots from iSCSI.
gPXE wiki
the second link is pretty much all I used. I set up my ASUS RT-N16 router with Tomato firmware to host the gPXE file using tftp. I will try and make a entry on getting tftp working on most any router but for now read around, you will want to know a thing or two about network booting first...
Now that the boot worked I needed something to boot. I could of gone the easy route of using a usb drive, boot into the live arch installer, install open-iscsi there, log into the target install arch on the target and set up in the live environment. Truthfully I hate sitting at my main computer with laptop by my and not having my main computer so I went my own route. I followed these instructions for install arch from a running system.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_from_Existing_Linux
Its actually quite easy from a running arch system. Start at Setup the Target System and you will be installed in a couple minutes. Next is grub, I always use grub2, don't ask me why but I always use grub2 (maybe because grub is always the one in the how to's and I like a challenge). This part was a little harder, follow the Arch Wiki pages for iscsi boot and grub2 - that will get you there.
Now that the boot worked I needed something to boot. I could of gone the easy route of using a usb drive, boot into the live arch installer, install open-iscsi there, log into the target install arch on the target and set up in the live environment. Truthfully I hate sitting at my main computer with laptop by my and not having my main computer so I went my own route. I followed these instructions for install arch from a running system.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_from_Existing_Linux
Its actually quite easy from a running arch system. Start at Setup the Target System and you will be installed in a couple minutes. Next is grub, I always use grub2, don't ask me why but I always use grub2 (maybe because grub is always the one in the how to's and I like a challenge). This part was a little harder, follow the Arch Wiki pages for iscsi boot and grub2 - that will get you there.
I think my chroot install of lightdm is done so more coming later....
No comments:
Post a Comment