Netboot Architecture #2
Description
We need a PXE server to run netboot for baremetal deployments on a wide range of hardware. Initially
Goals
- Rapid OS prototyping and debugging
- Ephemeral/immutable OS states
Requirements
- DHCP server (for discovery of servers)
- TFTP server (PXE server)
- HTTP server (optional UI)
We can often assume that DHCP already exists for the initial phase of this server, perhaps later we may want to consider a more robust solution. Unless we choose an installer with a UI like netboot.xyz, we we won't need HTTP.
That leaves the most barebones deployment, requiring hosting a tftp server.
dnsmasq is a fairly common approach to achieving this, but if we want to use this as a client tool in any capacity, we should likely want to run something more portable.
We are considering the altugbakan/rs-tftpd library as it is written in Rust and has a decent amount of adoption.