[ipxe-devel] Using ipxe to only retrieve boot loader and OS image and not install

[Michael Brown]

On Wednesday 08 Dec 2010 01:09:43 Vinay Venkataraghavan wrote:
> 1. Is it possible use ipxe on an already booted system to just retrieve the
> "network boot program" (i.e boot loader) and the OS image only.
> 
> 2. When built I am assuming ipxe generates an iso image which can be burned
>  onto disk. Is it possible to just have an executable that can be run on a
>  linux system for example.
> 
> My goal is to try to build and modify this system to just use it to fetch
>  images and boot loaders from a PXE server, but not use it to boot the
>  system.

Thanks to Piotr Jaroszyński, you can build a version of iPXE that will run 
under Linux.  For example:

  make bin-x86_64-linux/tap.linux
  ./bin-x86_64-linux/tap.linux --net tap,if=tap0,mac=00:0c:29:c5:39:a1

This is intended to be a developers' aide rather than a general-purpose tool 
for end users, but you should be able to use it for what you describe.  You 
will need to set up a tap0 interface, which you can bridge to your normal 
network interface if you want to download files from a remote server.

I'm not quite sure why you want to do this, but it should at least be 
possible!

Michael