Netboot

Hic sunt dracones! Why am I doing all of this? Over the past few years, a lot of people have asked me to explain them what MAAS is and what is netboot. So I thought it would be a good idea to write about the problem itself and how solutions evolved over time. Before tackling things like quadratic equations, you start by learning numbers and basic arithmetic, right? In the previous post we’ve covered RARP and got to the state where our machine was requesting /tftpboot/kernel.10.166.116.76 over TFTP. ...

These days, we take certain things for granted: there’s always DHCP, PXE-enabled clients and modern UEFI firmware with rich UI and mouse support. Imagine we are in the 1980s: the Xerox Alto already exists, but it’s still too early even for BOOTP. Though the world looked very different back then, the problem of network booting was already there. The concept is simple: computer contains bootstrap code stored in a non-volatile memory (e.g. ROM), which allows it to connect to a server and retrieve the kernel over a network. ...