netboot.xyz-edgerouter.md

Setting up netboot.xyz with an EdgeRouter

This document covers how to setup netboot.xyz, a service that provides iPXE-based installation and live boot of a bunch of operating systems, on a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter.

Assumptions

I've made a few assumptions throughout this document that will probably be different for your setup:

• There is a DHCP pool called LAN
• The LAN pool manages 10.10.2.0/24

Basic setup

With that out of the way, let's get started.

First, we're going to configure the main and contrib components with a mirror for Wheezy:

configure

set system package repository wheezy components 'main contrib'
set system package repository wheezy distribution wheezy 
set system package repository wheezy url http://http.us.debian.org/debian

commit
save
exit

Update the apt cache with our newly configured repo using sudo apt-get update.

Next, install TFTPD: sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa. The service will be running once the package is installed. It doesn't require any further configuration.

Setup TFTP components

Download the kpxe image for netboot.xyz and set the permissions properly:

sudo curl -o /srv/tftp/netboot.xyz.kpxe https://boot.netboot.xyz/ipxe/netboot.xyz.kpxe
sudo chown tftp:tftp /srv/tftp/netboot.xyz.kpxe

At this point you should be able to use a TFTP client from a client in 10.10.2.0/24 to fetch the image:

$ tftp 10.10.2.1
tftp> get netboot.xyz.kpxe
Received 354972 bytes in 2.0 seconds

Configure dhcpd

We're gonna configure DHCP on the EdgeRouter to serve the right parameters to clients:

configure

set service dhcp-server global-parameters "option client-arch code 93 = unsigned integer 16;"
edit service dhcp-server shared-network-name LAN subnet 10.10.2.0/24
set bootfile-server 10.10.2.1
set bootfile-name netboot.xyz.kpxe

commit
save

The configuration for the LAN pool should now look something like the following:

skottler@edge1# show service dhcp-server shared-network-name LAN
 authoritative enable
 subnet 10.10.2.0/24 {
     bootfile-name netboot.xyz.kpxe
     bootfile-server 10.10.2.1
     default-router 10.10.2.1
     dns-server 10.10.2.1
     lease 86400
     start 10.10.2.100 {
         stop 10.10.2.199
     }
 }
[edit]

That's it!

This awesome 🤘, thank you for writing this up. It worked great on my ER-X.

Thanks for this, Sam! I had been meaning to experiment with netboot.xyz and this worked like a charm for me.

Hey there,

I had to add this to make it work with systemd on edgeOS 2.x :
/etc/init.d/tftpd-hpa

SYSTEMCTL_SKIP_REDIRECT=yes
SYSTEMD_NO_WRAP=yes

It look like you can user the dnsmasq tftp server too :
https://netboot.xyz/booting/tftp/edgerouter/