debian currently has diskless and lessdisks.

Diskless appears to be an NFS root system where apps run on the client Lessdisks is a terminal based system that runs software on the server.

First off we want a version of grub that has has pxegrub apt-get source grub

I then edited the debian/rules file and added the following --enable-diskless (several net cards)

apt-get install lessdisks

I mostly followed along the lessdisks-doc/install

On the router I added the following to dnsmasq.conf (I really should back that bugger up)

# configure network booting #dhcp-vendorclass=pxe,PXEClient dhcp-boot=net:/tftpboot/pxegrub,dara,192.168.1.13

dhcp-option=17,/var/lib/lessdisks #root-path dhcp-option=42,192.168.1.1 #ntp-server dhcp-option=48,192.168.1.13 #font-server dhcp-option=49,192.168.1.13 #x-display-manager dhcp-option=66,dara.ghic.org # tftp-server-name dhcp-option=pxe,67,pxegrub #bootfile-name dhcp-option=69,192.168.1.13 #smtp-server

sigh the pxe client wasn't smart enough to boot off of a different computer than what we started with. So i tried with dara being the dhcp server, i got further but then ran into problems with not being able to load pxegrub from things other than /tftpboot

pxegrub had problems, when i switched to pxelinux.0, installed the default file into pxelinux.cfg (and then copied all of /var/lib/lessdisks/boot into /tftpboot I was able to boot. Unfortunately the kernel they installed doesn't support the ethernet card on my amd64 box.

What do i have to do to get a tftp server to server files off of something other than /tftpboot (or is just the pxeclient that has trouble with it?)