Linux tftp Server For Diskless Clients   June 4th, 2010

Diskless client can be very useful for educational institutes, testing setups or the networks that have limited hardware resources available with them. Linux offers a robust diskless environment that can be configured on CentOS with ease.

Server Setup

To configure server we need (NFS, xinetd, tftp and dhcp server). I hope all these services already installed in your system. If you do not find these services in your system you can install all of them as follow

yum install  xinetd tftp-server nfs-utils nfs-utils-lib sytem-config-nfs busybox-anaconda system-config-netboot

Create a directory on the NFS server to contain the diskless environment such as /diskless/i386/TECHBABU/ e.g

mkdir -p /diskless/i386/TECHBABU/root/
mkdir -p /diskless/i386/TECHBABU/snapshot

In the above configuration I have selected (TECHBABU) as operating identifier. You can change according to your need.

Configuring the NFS Server

Edit file /etc/exports

/diskless/i386/TECHBABU/root/     *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)
/diskless/i386/TECHBABU/snapshot/ *(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

Next we need to start NFS Server

service nfs start

Let’s copy a running Linux OS in diskless environment through rsync utility. For example: Read the rest of this entry »

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