On 12/10/20 8:37 PM, Dan Egli wrote: > I know I asked before about PXE booting windows and the general > consensus was you couldn't. But now I'm looking to PXE boot some Linux > machines, however people are telling me that with Systemd you can't > pxeboot. Is this true? If not, what's the best way to get things setup > so that the machine can network boot, but systemd from box 1 doesn't > step on systemd from box 2's toes? > PXE booting is usually done to install a base image to a machine. If you want to PXE boot and run diskless clients, you may have to shuffle some things into the initrd and change systemd service dependencies to start the network before mounting the root filesystem and chrooting to it.
As said before, to have a common filesystem/image with machine-specific customization (whether made by systemd, admin, or user) , you are going to have to get clever with overlayfs or some combination of small NFS or local volumes mounted into the tree. You will have to be careful that processes needing files in the customized mount areas are not run before the overlay/mounts are ready, else the processes may continue to use the open file descriptors from the original volume. This is something you are going to have to research and play with. It is not likely to be a weekend project. I know guys that do a much simpler version of what you are asking, where only their applications are installed to a network location, and their workstations are imaged with a smaller, common base image. Even something that simple can be complicated and time-consuming to get working in the first place. As long as you enjoy trying, you'll probably learn a lot in the process. If your goal is to reduce your time managing a handful of machines right now, then this is not the solution you are looking for. Use clusterssh to pass the same commands to multiple machines, while still being able to easily do something different on one of the machines as you do it. When the number of similar machines increases, and even clusterssh starts to get onerous, start looking into more complicate things like saltstack/ansible/puppet/chef/cfengine, LDAP, NIS, etc. Grazie, ;-Daniel /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
