Setting up PXE on the miniHPC

minihpc

What is PXE Boot?

In computing, the Preboot eXecution Environment specification describes a standardised client–server environment that boots a software assembly, retrieved from a network, on PXE-enabled clients. (Wikipedia)

List of ToDos

Step 1

Rather than duplicating instructions that might change, we’d rather link to the Raspberry Pi website where you can download the Raspberry Pi imager from and also find the instruction for writing an image to an SD card. The most important thing to remember is to select the Raspberry Pi OS Lite image because you don’t want to unneccessarily install a graphics environment which only takes up space on the installation disk and make things slower. The link to the web page is https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/.

Step 2

In a bash terminal do the following:

sudo apt update -y
sudo apt full-upgrade -y

Step 3

Install dnsmasq and nfs (Network file system):

sudo apt install dnsmasq nfs-kernel nfs-common

Step 4

Configure DNS masquerading and NFS.

To configure DNS masquerading edit the file /etc/dnsmasq.conf as follows:

port=0
bind-dynamic
interface=eth0
domain-needed
bogus-priv
enable-tftp
tftp-root=/pxe-boot
pxe-service=0,"Raspberry Pi Boot"
dhcp-option=3,192.168.5.100
dhcp-option=6,10.3.141.1
dhcp-range=eth0,192.168.5.101,192.168.5.200,12h
dhcp-host=a1:a1:a1:a1:a1:a1,192.168.5.101
dhcp-host=a2:a2:a2:a2:a2:a2,192.168.5.102
dhcp-host=a3:a3:a3:a3:a3:a3,192.168.5.103
dhcp-host=a4:a4:a4:a4:a4:a4,192.168.5.104
dhcp-host=a5:a5:a5:a5:a5:a5,192.168.5.105
dhcp-host=a6:a6:a6:a6:a6:a6,192.168.5.106
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