I'm interested in learning more about UEFI HTTPBoot and setting it up for my
LAN as a netboot option, but the details are notably sparse. The best docs I've
found are [Suse Docs](https://documentation.suse.com/sles/15-SP2/html/SLES-all/cha-deployment-prep-uefi-httpboot.html) for
configuring an HTTP Boot server, but it's lacking some information I'm wondering about.
I use PFSense as my DHCP/DNS server. According to [this blog](https://mrguitar.net/?p=2393) ,
the option for HTTP boot in PFSense became available in 2.6, which is a pretty
recent release. According to the blog post, PFSense must be configured with a
specialty option to get this to work:
vendor-class-identifier “HTTPClient”
with a "Number" of 60.
There's very little information about the boot process or requirements of
the Network Boot Program
(NBP), or the process to prep the payload for netboot.
Have several questions:
* Can any linux distro that supports UEFI (and has a *.efi
file) be pointed to
for HTTP Boot?
* What is the process to prep the NBP? Extract a given distro's ISO contents to
any HTTP static server and point to the *.efi
file in the URL?
* It seems once the EFI file is loaded, a bootloader is initiated? Will any
bootloader work, or does it need to be something that specifically supports HTTPBoot?
How is the bootloader configured such that the *.efi
or some other process
understands to launch that specific bootloader?
* Is the root file system specified as just the path relative to the host in the
URI file?
* Once I have a bootloader configured, if I wanted to have several different available
distros, do I just need to configure them accordingly in the bootloader config,
and I can just pick one of the *.efi
files to launch it?
* What is the vendor-class-identifier
option, and the "Number" associated with it?
Asked by eriknelson
(113 rep)
Jul 18, 2023, 02:03 PM
Last activity: Jul 18, 2023, 10:27 PM
Last activity: Jul 18, 2023, 10:27 PM