[ipxe-devel] ipxe newbie booting question

[Michael Brown]

On 27/07/17 19:06, Lonnie Cumberland wrote:
> The reason that I need to boot iPXE from an iso is because I am booting 
> from public hosted VPS machines that are located on the Internet.
> 
> I can boot each machine and now get to the iPXE shell. How can I have 
> the iPXE call the dnsmasq that I have running on another VPS machine at 
> boot.example.com <http://boot.example.com> as an example.  I am trying 
> to find, in the iPXE site and docs that show me how to have the iPXE 
> shell call the bootp server so that it can return the IP and send over 
> to the TFTP server to start returning the OS to be loaded onto the VPS 
> machine?

Don't use TFTP.  Since you already have iPXE loaded, you can just use 
HTTP to perform the rest of the boot.

Public cloud providers typically allow you to configure some kind of 
metadata associated with virtual machine instances.  For example, Amazon 
Web Services lets you specify an arbitrary blob of "user-data".  You can 
use this to hold an iPXE script that will control the boot.  See, for 
example:

   http://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git/commitdiff/cc25260

or

   http://git.ipxe.org/ipxe.git/commitdiff/de85336

You could have your iPXE perform a standard DHCP request, and use the 
DHCP server to control the boot process.  However, public cloud 
providers often do not allow you to either control the DHCP 
configuration or run your own DHCP server.  You will almost certainly 
find the above metadata-based approach to be easier.

Michael