PXE booting ubuntu into a ramdisk

Question

I currently have a small PXE server running and it works fine. The only issue is that the clients seem to be running their OS from the server itself. Eventually this will become a server supporting about 50 clients. I need to keep as much network traffic off the network as possible. How can I build the image so that the clients run everything from their own RAM Disk rather than the NFS server?

Thanks.

Answer 1

You may use memdisk from syslinux-common package to boot using ISO image directly though TFTP. Somehow slow (2MB/s is the best I could get using TFTP, around 5min to load)

memdisk loads iso image to RAM and mount it like virtual/fake CD drive then boot from it. So the machine should have enough RAM to hold CD and run its contained OS.

1. Copy memdisk & ISO images to TFTP root

2. Add menu entries to PXE configuration file, Example:

   LABEL slitaz
       MENU LABEL ^Slitaz.iso
       TEXT HELP
   Testing boot from iso.
       ENDTEXT 
       KERNEL memdisk
       APPEND initrd=slitaz-cooking.iso
   
   LABEL mini_ubutnu
       MENU LABEL Mini-Ubuntu
       KERNEL memdisk
       APPEND initrd=ubuntu_mini.iso
   

Reference: syslinux - memdisk