freebsd tftp server for hetrogenous diskless clients

[Daniel Feenberg]

On Sun, 13 Jun 2021, tech-lists wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Can freebsd be a pxe/tftp/nfs server for linux 
> (ubuntu/debian/arch) clients?
>
> any pitfalls/gotchas?

We have more than 30 Linux clients PXE booting from a FreeBSD server. This 
is not a network install, /bin /sbin etc are NFS mounts.

We have been doing this for many years, currently the Linux clients are 
all CentOS, they have been Ubuntu at times in the past. Both FreeBSD and 
Linux have been kept up to current supported releases.

We like PXE booting with system files on read-only server because it makes 
updates quick and easy, ensures uniformity across clients and is in 
general convenient. We don't do it to save disk space. Network bandwidth 
is not really a problem - 1GBE is fine for this, although we upgraded to 
10GBE some years ago because the applications do a lot of network I/O. If 
you lose the network connection the client will hang till the network is 
restored, and jobs will continue from where they left off.

Daniel Feenberg
NBER

>
> thanks,
> -- 
> J.
>