On May 30 05:08 PM, Alari Kask wrote: > I have a vision of something like this : > > My OpenBSD machine acts as a pxe boot server, clients on the lan boot > pxe and get a choice of booting the operating system on the clients hard > drive, or boot openbsd kernel for installation or diagnostics and for > example boot memtest86 or some other diagnostic program ? > > Can this be done with OpenBSD ? > > I only saw instructions on booting OpenBSD kernel from PXE, but i would > like to have some more options, as described before. > > Any suggestions/comments are welcome.
Use PXELINUX (I know, but it's actually just a network bootloader and doesn't really have anything to do with linux) from http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php. It's config allows you to do a simple menu for choosing which kernel to netboot. I've used it before to set up multiple OS installers and it works really well. It boots the FreeBSD pxe kernel as well and I just confirmed that it boots the OpenBSD 3.7 pxeboot and install (rd) kernel. I have the boot server with pxelinux set up on another openbsd machine, it works as long as you have something recent (>3.5?) where the tftp server has tsize support. Just copy pxeboot and bsd.rd into your tftp directory, and then add a section to the pxelinux config like: LABEL openbsd KERNEL pxeboot I usually set it up with a 10 second timeout and then set up a default target to boot off the local disk, and then set up the system BIOS to always pxe boot. It also has really good serial support so you can do all this remotely. You'll have to figure out how to force the openbsd kernel to use serial over pxe, I haven't messed with that yet but it shouldn't be very difficult. According to man 8 pxeboot, it will look for an /etc/boot.conf on the tftp server so you should be able to stuff the serial commands into that. Matt
