PXE Boot – How to Boot Ubuntu into a Ramdisk

networkingnfspxeserver

I currently have a small PXE server running and it works fine. The only issue is that the clients seem to be running their OS from the server itself. Eventually this will become a server supporting about 50 clients. I need to keep as much network traffic off the network as possible. How can I build the image so that the clients run everything from their own RAM Disk rather than the NFS server?

Thanks.

Best Answer

You may use memdisk from syslinux-common package to boot using ISO image directly though TFTP. Somehow slow (2MB/s is the best I could get using TFTP, around 5min to load)

memdisk loads iso image to RAM and mount it like virtual/fake CD drive then boot from it. So the machine should have enough RAM to hold CD and run its contained OS.

  1. Copy memdisk & ISO images to TFTP root

  2. Add menu entries to PXE configuration file, Example:

    LABEL slitaz
    MENU LABEL ^Slitaz.iso
    TEXT HELP
Testing boot from iso.
    ENDTEXT 
    KERNEL memdisk
    APPEND initrd=slitaz-cooking.iso

LABEL mini_ubutnu
    MENU LABEL Mini-Ubuntu
    KERNEL memdisk
    APPEND initrd=ubuntu_mini.iso

Reference: syslinux - memdisk

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