Re: Anyone Tried to use iPXE to boot with iSCSI?
- Original Message - From: Paul Wootton cas...@caspersworld.co.uk To: Bill Tillman btillma...@yahoo.com Cc: Sent: Thursday, September 20, 2012 4:08 AM Subject: Re: Anyone Tried to use iPXE to boot with iSCSI? On 09/20/12 01:42, Bill Tillman wrote: Interesting project you've got there. I can't say mine is similar but I do have a machine which I'm using as a router which boots disklessly. Running 8.3-STABLE amd64, in fact I just rebuilt the world on both the server which serves this puppy it's OS and the /diskless partition where this puppy get's it's boot up from. Booting by pxe is not an easy thing to do. The docs are terrible and out of synch with the latest versions of the OS. I think there may have been some improvments on that end but it's still kind of a seat of the pants operation. I had several contacts in #FreeBSD on FreeNode who told me they had many diskless servers running yet when pressed for how they did it the answers they gave were vague and ambiguous, that is if they answered at all. I did finally find a site which explained most of it in an almost clear manner, but even that site was filled with typos and out of date information. The router I've built is great...no disks at all and until the reboot a few weeks ago it had been running 24/7 for 276 days...without one failure. We watch lots of NetFlix movies here, sometimes two or three at a time with my teenage kids here with their laptops. And I can still enjoy a quick download or two in my lab while all this bandwidth is being served. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org Hi Bil,, I am actually looking at doing something very similar with my soekris box. Currently it boots from a CF card, but the card is getting old and I think it is coming to the end of it's life. Can you please shed a little light on what you did? Cheers Paul This is the website where I found the best and most accurate information on diskless booting. http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/FreeBSD-diskless.html The authors appear to have updated this just a few months ago as well. I had trouble with it until I understood what the conf/ folders were all about. It's easy for a novice to read this and get confused because the authors assume the reader knows as much about it as they do or they are just lazy hacks like me and don't want to type all the real meat of the setup. I wrote an e-mail to them and explained several typos they had in their article in 2010 when I first found this article. The guy who replied back was very cool and he thanked me for helping with some of the corrections. I read lots of other stuff, including the FreeBSD handbook but as usual it was not in synch with the newest releases and I couldn't get it working. I'm happy to say that now I have a wonderful diskless setup which I can update when I want toI don't think I'm going to go past 8.3-STABLE with it. The new 9.x-RELEASE uses a new drive format which has created problems for me with the older equipment I have around here. I'm finally throwing out most of the old stuff I've had for years around here. Just built two new Windows 7 workstations with i7 Quad cores and 16 GB RAM. These older servers are still working fine for me and I plan on using them until they drop. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Anyone Tried to use iPXE to boot with iSCSI?
On 19/09/2012 06:53, dweimer wrote: I was just trying some proof of concept testing to see if I could get a system booting with no local disk using iSCSI running from my FreeNAS box. I got started, by first booting a 9.1-RC1 CD, into live CD, created a /tmp/iscsi.conf used kldload to load the iscsi initiator, connected to the target, created a gpt boot partition, swap partition and just a single / volume using remianing space. Copied the bootcode, created the file system, extracted the system etc. Created a loader.conf file, added the iscsi_initiator_load=YES option, copied my /tmp/iscsi.conf file to the new file system at /etc/iscsi.conf created a /etc/fstab file using the gpart labels to mount / and swap partitions. Booted the system from the iPXE.iso, ran the necessary configuration options, connected to the iscsi volume, and booted from it. It does launch the bootcode, as expected, and then breaks failing to mount root. Whoch I actually expected, I have proved I can install to an iSCSI volume, I can connect to that iSCSI volume prior to loading the kernel, and load the kernel from it. What I can't seem to find any information on is how to mount iSCSI volumes at boot on FreeBSD, so that the kernel can mount the root partition. Does anyone have any idea how to do this, or if its even possible? Sounds like you need this http://freebsd.1045724.n5.nabble.com/iSCSI-boot-driver-0-2-5-isboot-ko-has-been-released-td5736301.html Vince ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Anyone Tried to use iPXE to boot with iSCSI?
On 2012-09-20 09:42, Vincent Hoffman wrote: On 19/09/2012 06:53, dweimer wrote: I was just trying some proof of concept testing to see if I could get a system booting with no local disk using iSCSI running from my FreeNAS box. I got started, by first booting a 9.1-RC1 CD, into live CD, created a /tmp/iscsi.conf used kldload to load the iscsi initiator, connected to the target, created a gpt boot partition, swap partition and just a single / volume using remianing space. Copied the bootcode, created the file system, extracted the system etc. Created a loader.conf file, added the iscsi_initiator_load=YES option, copied my /tmp/iscsi.conf file to the new file system at /etc/iscsi.conf created a /etc/fstab file using the gpart labels to mount / and swap partitions. Booted the system from the iPXE.iso, ran the necessary configuration options, connected to the iscsi volume, and booted from it. It does launch the bootcode, as expected, and then breaks failing to mount root. Whoch I actually expected, I have proved I can install to an iSCSI volume, I can connect to that iSCSI volume prior to loading the kernel, and load the kernel from it. What I can't seem to find any information on is how to mount iSCSI volumes at boot on FreeBSD, so that the kernel can mount the root partition. Does anyone have any idea how to do this, or if its even possible? Sounds like you need this http://freebsd.1045724.n5.nabble.com/iSCSI-boot-driver-0-2-5-isboot-ko-has-been-released-td5736301.html Vince That's looking promising, I had actually ran across an earlier version of this last night, of course that was all dealing with 8.1. Will definitely do more looking into it, however it doesn't seem to be at a point I would consider running anything more than a test environment from it. My actual goal with this project if the proof of concept panned out was to replace the old aging internal SATA Mirrored drives in my Home web/email server (They are showing a decent number of smart pre-fail indicators, but still working for now). I have fairly new SATA drives in my FreeNAS box, and thought maybe since my Gig network is barely being taxed, that I could save some cash for new disk drives, to be put towards future upgrades to the FreeNAS box instead. However I am not ruling out the possibility altogether yet, and am going to run some tests with booting from a very minimal set of required files on a USB thumb Drive, and mounting everything else from iSCSI. I am already running all my VMware Test Virtual Machines on my workstation from an iSCSI volume mounted from my FreeNAS box, and know that it performs well enough in my network to handle the small amount of traffic to my website and my email without any problems. -- Thanks, Dean E. Weimer http://www.dweimer.net/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Anyone Tried to use iPXE to boot with iSCSI?
I was just trying some proof of concept testing to see if I could get a system booting with no local disk using iSCSI running from my FreeNAS box. I got started, by first booting a 9.1-RC1 CD, into live CD, created a /tmp/iscsi.conf used kldload to load the iscsi initiator, connected to the target, created a gpt boot partition, swap partition and just a single / volume using remianing space. Copied the bootcode, created the file system, extracted the system etc. Created a loader.conf file, added the iscsi_initiator_load=YES option, copied my /tmp/iscsi.conf file to the new file system at /etc/iscsi.conf created a /etc/fstab file using the gpart labels to mount / and swap partitions. Booted the system from the iPXE.iso, ran the necessary configuration options, connected to the iscsi volume, and booted from it. It does launch the bootcode, as expected, and then breaks failing to mount root. Whoch I actually expected, I have proved I can install to an iSCSI volume, I can connect to that iSCSI volume prior to loading the kernel, and load the kernel from it. What I can't seem to find any information on is how to mount iSCSI volumes at boot on FreeBSD, so that the kernel can mount the root partition. Does anyone have any idea how to do this, or if its even possible? -- Thanks, Dean E. Weimer http://www.dweimer.net/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Anyone Tried to use iPXE to boot with iSCSI?
- Original Message - From: dweimer dwei...@dweimer.net To: FreeBSD Questions freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Cc: Sent: Wednesday, September 19, 2012 1:53 AM Subject: Anyone Tried to use iPXE to boot with iSCSI? I was just trying some proof of concept testing to see if I could get a system booting with no local disk using iSCSI running from my FreeNAS box. I got started, by first booting a 9.1-RC1 CD, into live CD, created a /tmp/iscsi.conf used kldload to load the iscsi initiator, connected to the target, created a gpt boot partition, swap partition and just a single / volume using remianing space. Copied the bootcode, created the file system, extracted the system etc. Created a loader.conf file, added the iscsi_initiator_load=YES option, copied my /tmp/iscsi.conf file to the new file system at /etc/iscsi.conf created a /etc/fstab file using the gpart labels to mount / and swap partitions. Booted the system from the iPXE.iso, ran the necessary configuration options, connected to the iscsi volume, and booted from it. It does launch the bootcode, as expected, and then breaks failing to mount root. Whoch I actually expected, I have proved I can install to an iSCSI volume, I can connect to that iSCSI volume prior to loading the kernel, and load the kernel from it. What I can't seem to find any information on is how to mount iSCSI volumes at boot on FreeBSD, so that the kernel can mount the root partition. Does anyone have any idea how to do this, or if its even possible? -- Thanks, Dean E. Weimer http://www.dweimer.net/ ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org Interesting project you've got there. I can't say mine is similar but I do have a machine which I'm using as a router which boots disklessly. Running 8.3-STABLE amd64, in fact I just rebuilt the world on both the server which serves this puppy it's OS and the /diskless partition where this puppy get's it's boot up from. Booting by pxe is not an easy thing to do. The docs are terrible and out of synch with the latest versions of the OS. I think there may have been some improvments on that end but it's still kind of a seat of the pants operation. I had several contacts in #FreeBSD on FreeNode who told me they had many diskless servers running yet when pressed for how they did it the answers they gave were vague and ambiguous, that is if they answered at all. I did finally find a site which explained most of it in an almost clear manner, but even that site was filled with typos and out of date information. The router I've built is great...no disks at all and until the reboot a few weeks ago it had been running 24/7 for 276 days...without one failure. We watch lots of NetFlix movies here, sometimes two or three at a time with my teenage kids here with their laptops. And I can still enjoy a quick download or two in my lab while all this bandwidth is being served. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
