Serving FreeBSD to Thin Clients

M

Miles

Apologies if this is not the correct section.

At this point I am just looking for ideas about booting diskless Thin Client machines over the network (PXE). Rather than serving up a FreeBSD installer, what I'm wanting to do is have a FreeBSD "installed image" (for want of a more descriptive term) that the clients can boot from. Obviously there are complications (such as setting each clients hostname, etc), but I'm not there yet.

I do have DHCP & DNS set up on another server, so I'm not so concerned about how to get the PXE boot working, more the idea of serving up an "installed" OS.

Has anybody built a similar setup and have any high level suggestions or cautionary advice?
 
Alternatively, if anybody has any recommendations on deployment schemes for multiple machines, i.e. building and remotely installing system images (with the relevant setup, such as hostname etc), that would also be very helpful.
 
If you haven't already, start by reading the diskless(8) man page. This describes a classic diskless setup; clients are booted with tftp, the root files system (and file systems in general) are mounted via nfs.
 
I have tried to get diskless setup working on numerous occasions sometimes with a modicum of success but generally hit a snag along the way.

I have a PXE server setup and that works very well, and you may learn quite a bit from studying this site. This will show you how to setup a PXE server. The main difference between the options shown, and running FreeBSD diskless is that you need to use pxeboot() rather than gpxelinux.0 in your dhcp 'filename' configuration.

Personally, I use pfSense to configure DHCP, it makes life much simpler and you can enable network booting as one of the options. You may learn something from this earlier Thread 71975
 
I've done it once it worked good. A network card which goes looking for a tftp server and a tftp server with data pointing to an nfs server.
But hard-disks are not expensive ...
 
tingo Thank you for your suggestion, I was not aware of diskless() but it does appear to provide exactly what I need, so thanks for that.

balanga Thank you for the PXE booting link, that will be a good read as I haven't yet set up a PXE server. The link to your previous thread is also quite useful w.r.t. read/write. I assume this is the aforementioned snag?

Alain De Vos Indeed, HDD's are very cheap these days. I'm going to be setting up the thin clients as Nomad worker nodes, so it's more to do with ease of update/maintenance.
 
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