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Installation

Prerequisites

For operation, genesis needs the following services

  • DHCP server
  • TFTP server
  • HTTP file server

Build

Build the boot image. This needs to be built in Linux with livecd-tools. The Genesis-bootbox virtualbox VM provided in the test environment has all the tools needed.

linuxbox$ cd bootscript && sudo ./create-image.sh
localmachine$ scp linuxbox:genesis/bootcd/output/genesis'*' genesis/web/public/ipxe-images/

Configuration

TFTP server

The TFTP server serves the iPXE binary to the PXE firmware. We use the xinetd server daemon to launch the tftp daemon for incoming requests.

service tftp
{
  disable     = no
  socket_type = dgram
  protocol    = udp
  wait        = yes
  user        = root
  server      = /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
  server_args = -s /var/lib/tftpboot
  per_source  = 11
  cps         = 1000 2
  instances   = 1000
  flags       = IPv4
}

Place the undionly.kpxe file (see the iPXE docs for more information) in /var/lib/tftpboot.

Example puppet code:

DHCP server

The DHCP server needs to be set up to chain load the iPXE firmware from the TFTP server. Using ISC DHCPd, a simplified configuration looks like

subnet 192.168.1.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
    range 192.168.1.200 192.168.1.229;
    option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
    option broadcast-address 192.168.1.255;
    option domain-name-servers <dns servers>;

    if exists ipxe.http {
        filename "<url to ipxe menu config>";
    } else {
        filename "undionly.kpxe";
        next-server <file server ip>;
    }
}

More information on DHCP for loading iPXE can be found at iPXE.org.

Example puppet code:

HTTP file server

The file server serves the genesis OS initrd and kernel so that iPXE can boot them. It also serves the genesis config.

It can also serve the iPXE menu configuration and the stage 2 ruby script. In a more complex setup however, these might be generated on the fly by a script.

Configuration files

Examples to all the configuration files mentioned above can be found in the test environment puppet code. Here are a couple of sample files that are good to check out.