ace-osinstaller

To use iPXE to setup my own development machine

This repo is used for creating osinstaller.iso without deploying extra DHCP server/tFTP server.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

Promptly start as long as there is docker (curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh) and make on your host and get help running make in the root path of this repo.

Usage

Use official ipxe.iso

1. Generate chainload.ipxe and put it on http server using make http_server
2. Download official ipxe.iso and follow the steps on Quick Start into PXE cli
3. Run the following cmd

iPXE> dhcp
iPXE> chain http://<server ip>/chainload.ipxe

There are limitations to this way:

• Not able to chain https url
• Inconvenience to debug without ping/nslookup

Build your own ipxe.iso (rename osinstaller.iso for distinction)

# SERVER_ADDR used to find chainload.ipxe, answerfiles which are created in output dir.
# Specified a IP for fetching chainload.ipxe over HTTP. If bypass this variable, it will use default IP
make iso SERVER_ADDR=http://<server ip>

# Start local http server with sudo priviledge.
make http_server

There are some artifacts, osinstaller.iso chainload.ipxe <some answerfile> and it will launch a http server against output/ dir Then, burn osinstaller.iso onto a blank CD-ROM or DVD-ROM or put it into the ISO library for the VM installation on XenServer/Vmware/KVM

For more details usage, just run make to get help.

Add Extra Distro

netboot configuration for various linux distro can be found in netboot.json

1. Add new section as below for new distro support

"New Distro Name": {
        "description": "The description of the distro",
        "kernel_location": "Location of Kernel/Initrd images, script will further find KERNEL_LOC without this key",
        "kernel_args": "Kernel parameters",
        "answerfile": "[Option] Location to answerfile",
        "kernel": "[Option] kernel image name",
        "initrd": "[Option] Initrd image name",
    },

2. Put new distro iso into output dir which created by make output
3. Restart http server make http_server
4. If wanted to tweak the kernel args, we only need to change it in output/chainload.ipxe instead of building osinstaller.iso again because of chain loading feature.

There are something specials in answerfile

1. Use /dev/xvda which is simply the Xen disk storage devices as disk partition , you need to update it if you use other Hypervisor
2. Use Text mode instead of desktop environment
3. Create an encrypted password for the user configuration in answerfile

  python3 -c 'import crypt,getpass;pw=getpass.getpass();print(crypt.crypt(pw) if (pw==getpass.getpass("Confirm: ")) else exit())'

Further Read

docs