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PXE booting a NAS4Free install

Posted: 23 Aug 2014 11:36
by Veni
Hello.

I've tried to make this work on a Intel NUC with the help of the kernel from version 10 to get the NIC working and the pxeboot file.
But there are some problems with saving changes permanently.

Is there a supported and documented solution?
I'm unable to find one, plus the abscence of the pxeboot file gives a hint that this probably is not supported.

The idea is:
* Small hardware footprint.
* No local storage for NAS4Free for saving temporary files and settings. Most optimal if NAS4Free boots and uses iSCSI or NFS for booting and core functions.
* A local USB 3.0 enclosure will be exposed to one Windows client with the help of iSCSI.

Anyone been able to PXE boot NAS4Free and savings settings to a remote storage location?

Sincerely
Veni

Re: PXE booting a NAS4Free install

Posted: 23 Aug 2014 14:12
by armandh
I may be all wrong
that said
I think NAS4Free identifies the config storage location during the boot process
I am fairly sure it must be FAT formatted and good with any limitation for the MB hardware.
remote boot hardware that uses flash rather than ROM might work
but short of a lot of modification; it is looking up the config long B4 any connection is established.

it does run in a virtual environment; not a help if I understand what you are trying

a partition in whatever storage seems possible to hold the config
or if there is a few spare KB in the bios

I think that to do this easily the config will have to be there rather than imported BUT
it may be possible on each boot to import the config to some 50 Kb ram drive B4 most of the N4F boot
thus accomplishing avoidance of local management or other goals and not adding local storage
possibly terminating the ram drive at the end of the boot if the last 50Kb is important

sorry just concept I do not write code

Re: PXE booting a NAS4Free install

Posted: 23 Aug 2014 16:56
by Veni
Thanks for the quick reply armandh.

During the tests it did try to look up the config.xml on fd0, but only if it did not find it from from the current relative root, and it did find it through a NFS mount(mount data from the dhcp server).
As far as I could see and in the following order, booting the pxeboot worked fine, booting the kernel worked fine, activating the NIC worked fine, mounting the NFS storage worked fine(had some problems with it being at a ReadOnly mode in beginning), and later on reading the config.xml worked.

I'll try to run a FreeBSD 10 network boot and see what is needed for USB enclosure <--> iSCSI to work. But I like the NAS4Free/old FreeNAS web GUI :). Much easier.
Maybe Webmin will have something with iSCSI on FreeBSD. Otherwise Webmin on CentOS does have a web GUI for iSCSI.