Boot a live cd from the net.

So I have talked about booting from a web server to do an install. Now we are going to go a bit farther and boot a live image from a web server. Depending on the size of the image, your destination machine will have to have enough memory to handle the load. For our purposes, we will use a very small linux distro for testing purposes. In this case, Slitaz should fit the bill so to speak. http://www.slitaz.org/en/get/.   Like the web installs we did, you will need a pxebootable device such as a floppy, usb, or cdrom/dvdrom.

Doing a web load has been around a long time, but the average user may not be aware of it. What is really neat about this is that you have older thin clients, they would be perfect for use with the web boot for the ones that will. While I was at it, I was  able to get it to boot from tftp server to a thin client. That setup is more involved and for another day.  One shortcoming is that Slitaz does not seem to use the usb keyboard out of the box.

:/var/www/slitaz$ ls
memdisk  slitaz5.iso

If you have been following my articles, you should be aware of how to make the boot media for the ipxe boot.  Had to get to files to the web directory to boot from first is the iso of course and the second is the memdisk. If you have syslinux installed, it should be there on your system.


#!ipxe
dhcp any
initrd http://192.168.1.32/tinycore/slitaz5.iso
chain http://192.168.1.32/debianlive/memdisk iso raw

or

    kernel Kernel/memdisk (or http://192.168.10.1/Kernel/memdisk)
    append iso initrd=192.168.10.1/Images/ubcd.iso

In doing the research for this, quite a few ways to do this.