PXE Live Boot Generator

Debian image files generator with test and simulation tools for PXE Booting environments.

Architecture

 _______________________________________________
|										  Host	|
|	vnc://localhost:5950						|
|	hiface										|
|	   \										|
|		\___________________________________	|
|		|\								VM	|	|
|		| \									|	|
|		| giface							|	|
|		|	 _____________   _____________	|	|
|		|	| DHCP Server | | tftp Server |	|	|
|		|	| 10.0.0.0/24 | |	(Docker)  |	|	|
|		|	|_____________|	|_____________|	|	|
|		|				 \	/				|	|
|		|				  \/				|	|
|		|				 tap0 (10.0.0.1)	|	|
|		|	 ______________|____________	|	|
|		|	|	Qemu (pxe-rtl8139.rom)	|	|	|
|		|	|	vnc:5950 (giface)		|	|	|
|		|	|___________________________|	|	|
|		|___________________________________|	|
|_______________________________________________|

• Host OS: Machine running this project.

• VM: Vagrant Virtual Machine

• hiface: default host virtual interface (the actual name varies on different Host OSs)

• giface: Vagrant's VM default interface (the actual name varies on different Guest OSs)

The 5950 port is forwarded to the Host machine, so that you can attach to the Qemu display by connecting to vnc://localhost:5950.

Procedure

This environment simulates a PXE server and a network booting i586 computer booting the generated boot images.

1. The boot images need to be generated and present on the tftp directory. If not, to generate those: make build. This Starts a Docker machine to build a customized Debian Live images that are built following the script in scripts/build.sh.

2. The default file must be present in tftp/pxelinux.cfg/default and set up for those boot images.

3. make start, starts a Vagrant machine, provisioned by vagrant/provisioning.sh, and described on the previous topic. This machine contains a dhcp server, a tftp server docker image containing all the needed syslinux(pxelinux) boot files, a qemu network booting machine as a systemd unit and network configurations.

Requirements

• make
• Docker
• Vagrant and a VM Hypervisor (Virtualbox, Parallels, VMWare)

Generating boot images

Build the squashfs root (filesystem.squashfs), linux image (vmlinuz) and initramfs (initrd.img):

make build

Testing

Starting the Vagrant machine to test the boot images with qemu:

make start

Now connect to vnc://localhost:5950 with a vnc client.

To Stop the Vagrant machine:

make stop

To Destroy the Vagrant machine:

make destroy