Home boot servers, any advice?

[Matt Graham]

> On Fri, Sep 9, 2016 at 12:53 PM, <stevensspam at cox.net> wrote:
>> Which got me thinking about stuff like taking dhcp off the cheap
>> router we're currently using, which eventually lead to thinking
>> about setting up a boot server with OS installers and utility discs.
On 2016-09-09 13:12, James Mcphee wrote:
> possibly a PXE boot setup where you don't have to have disks on your
> compute nodes at all.  You'd store a boot kernel and initrd in a tftp
> target and that'd get your boxen up far enough to mount and finish
> booting to their remote disk.

Like many things, it depends on the details.  What OSes are you going 
to be installing?  Some distros like Fedora have kernel images/initrd 
files/stuff already set up for PXE-booting.  Gentoo doesn't, which seems 
a little odd, but https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Installation_alternatives 
explains how to make this possible.  Both "PXE-booting the installer and 
installing to a local disk" and "PXE-booting the installer and having / 
on NFS" are covered.  The second thing is more difficult.  The concepts 
in that URL may be transferrable to other distros.

I am not sure whether random utility CDs would support PXE-booting or 
not.  Try it and see?

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