Jun 26, 2013 By
Kyle Rankin
In this article, I've decided to follow up on a topic I wrote about not
in my column directly, but as a feature article called
"PXE
Magic" in
the April 2008 issue. In that article, I talk about how to set up a PXE
server from scratch, including how to install and configure DHCP and TFTP.
Ultimately, I even provide a basic pxelinux configuration to get you
started. Since then, PXE menus with pxelinux have become more sophisticated
and graphical and could seem a bit intimidating if you are new to it. In
this column, I explain how to piggyback off of the work the
Debian and Ubuntu projects have done with their PXE configuration to make
your own fancy PXE menu without much additional work. I know not everyone
uses Debian or Ubuntu, so if you use a different distribution, hold off on the
angry e-mail messages; you still can use the PXE configuration I'm showing here
for your distro, provided it gives some basic examples of how to PXE
boot its installer. Just use these steps as a launching off point and
tweak the PXE config to work for you.
Simple Ubuntu PXE Menu
If this is your first time configuring a PXE server, for the first step,
I recommend following my steps in the
"PXE Magic" article to install
and configure DHCP and TFTP.
Otherwise, if you have existing servers in
place, just make sure that DHCP is configured to point to your TFTP server
(if it's on the same machine, that's fine). And, if you already have any
sort of pxelinux configuration in your tftpboot directory, I recommend that
you back it up and move it out of the way—I'm going to assume that your
entire /var/lib/tftpboot (or /tftpboot on some systems) directory is
empty to start with. For the rest of this article, I reference
/var/lib/tftpboot as the location to store your PXE configuration files,
so if you use /tftpboot, adjust the commands accordingly.
Both Debian and Ubuntu provide a nice all-in-one netboot configuration
for each of their releases that makes it simple to PXE boot a
particular release yourself. The file is called netboot.tar.gz
and is located in a netboot directory along with the rest of the
different install images. For instance, the netboot.tar.gz for
the i386 Ubuntu 12.04 release (named Precise) can be found at
http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz.
To get started,
cd to your tftpboot directory, and
then use
wget to pull
down the netboot.tar.gz file (I'm assuming you'll need root permissions
for all of these steps, so I'm putting
sudo in front
of all of my commands),
and then extract the tarball:
$ cd /var/lib/tftpboot
$ sudo wget http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/
↪main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz
$ sudo tar xzf netboot.tar.gz
$ ls
netboot.tar.gz pxelinux.0 pxelinux.cfg
↪ubuntu-installer version.info
As the
ls command shows, an ubuntu-installer directory was created
along with pxelinux.0 and pxelinux.cfg symlinks that point inside
that ubuntu-installer directory to the real files. Without performing
any additional configuration, provided your DHCP and TFTP servers were
functioning, you could PXE boot a server with this configuration and get
a boot menu like the one shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Ubuntu Precise PXE Boot Menu
Ubuntu has taken the extra steps of theming its PXE menu with its
color scheme and even provided a logo. Unlike the PXE menu I demoed in my
previous "PXE Magic" article, this menu functions more like a
GUI program. You
can use the arrow keys to navigate it, the Enter key to select a menu item
and the Tab key to edit a menu entry.
