[ipxe-devel] Booting LiveCD ISO over TFTP?

[Christian Nilsson]

On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 10:10 PM, Richard Duran <duranr at yahoo.com> wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 27, 2017 at 1:37 PM, Christian Nilsson
> <nikize at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> ipxe.org is mostly documentation, I can agree that it can be hard to
> navigate and find what you are looking for sometimes, but most information
> is there.
> There is also forum.ipxe.org which has this question and many others
> asked, and in most cases also answered.
>
> To start with your question about Live CD - you probably don't want to
> load the ISO into memory and then try to boot it even if iPXE can do that.
> One of many posts that explains why it probably won't work as you expect
> can be found at: http://forum.ipxe.org/showthread.php?tid=9314&pid=
> 14693#pid14693
>
> Loading anything large-ish over TFTP is probably a bad idea just because
> it's slow. One of the best parts with iPXE is it's high performance http
> support, so strongly suggest to use that.
>
> I don't remember the exact details but path access mostly works relative,
> if you just run chain filename, it should use tftp with the server ip given
> via dhcp, which is stored in the next-server variable. I can recommend the
> config command to check around which settings exists.
>
> /Christian
>
> My apologies.  What I meant by documentation was more along the lines of
> an actual user guide or reference.
>
> That said, I'm restricted to making this work on Windows server using
> native capabilities when available, i.e. no Apache. I don't have any
> interest in learning how to setup and secure the native HTTP server.
>
> I understand the limitations of TFTP,  but don't have the ready capability
> to rebuild IPXE with NFS enabled. That is unless it can be done fairly
> easily in a LiveCD environment.
>
> Thank you for the info on relative paths.
>
> Kind regards,
> -rd
>

I'd strongly encourage you to use IIS rather then TFTP - it will save you
lots and _lots_ of pain.
Minimal install of IIS is totally fine, just create a clean site and don't
enable https and there won't be any bigg issues ... if you want to be super
secure you could even disable all ASP and other scripting support easily
via the UI.

Getting the windows TFTP service to play ball just for the basic stuff
usually takes a few weeks in most cases :(
And NFS isn't really a better option.

In regards to rebuilding you probably will want to be able to, and it's
even possible with the new "Linux support" in Windows 10 so just get a
local ubuntu shell up-n-running and you will be able to build if need be.

But none of this will solve the ISO boot issue on It's own, what are you
trying to boot?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ipxe.org/pipermail/ipxe-devel/attachments/20170927/cfca9362/attachment.htm>