pxeboot-docker

pxeboot-docker brings together spriteful and pixiecore to make pxebooting easy!

TL;DR

Boot another machine from the same network.

Clone the project:

git clone https://github.com/engineerang/pxeboot-docker.git
cd pxeboot-docker

Change "mac": "00:00:00:00:00:00" or "mac": "11:11:11:11:11:11" to a machine's mac address you'd like to boot:

vim config.json.example

Run docker-compose:

docker-compose up

Why?

pxeboot-docker is a docker project aimed at making pxebooting trivial. To do this it brings together pixiecore and spriteful to create a minimalist pxebooting service.

As elegantly covered by pixiecore, PXEBooting shouldn't be as hard as it is to setup. And although pixiecore has achieved reducing the complexity, it stops at providing a mechanism to control what configuration a certain machine on your network should boot with, this is where spriteuful comes in. spriteful is an API that provides server boot configurations for pixiecore.

Installation

Requirements

In order to use this project you will need a few things:

Docker

Docker is required, see the installation guide for your flavour of operating system.

This has been mostly tested with Docker on Linux (Ubuntu) and i can't make any guarantees that it will work from MacOS or Windows.

Docker-compose

The easiest way to get docker-compose is through Python's package manager, pip.

python36 -m venv .env
source .env/bin/activate
pip install docker-compose

Running

config.json

The configuration of machines is done via the config.json. The provided sample configuration demonstrates how it can be rudimentarily used for CoreOS or Centos 8 (not at all production ready).

The config.json structure follows the basic concepts of the pxelinux.cfg file, for example:

label 1
menu label ^2) Install CentOS 8 x64 with http://mirror.centos.org Repo
kernel http://mirror.centos.org/centos-8/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz
append initrd=http://mirror.centos.org/centos-8/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/images/pxeboot/initrd.img method=http://mirror.centos.org/centos-8/8/BaseOS/x86_64/ devfs=nomount ip=dhcp

is equivalent to:

{
    "mac": "your-mac-address-here",
    "kernel": "http://mirror.centos.org/centos-8/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/images/pxeboot/vmlinuz",
    "initrd": [ "http://mirror.centos.org/centos-8/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/images/pxeboot/initrd.img" ],
    "cmdline": "method=http://mirror.centos.org/centos-8/8/BaseOS/x86_64/ devfs=nomount ip=dhcp"
}

To boot a machine of your own specification, add the machine's mac address you'd like to boot and provide the pxeboot configurations as demonstrated above.

Once you make your own configuration, lets call it awesome-config.json don't forget to update the docker-compose.yaml to mount in your file:

  spriteful:
     container_name: spriteful
     build:
       context: .
     restart: always
     volumes:
        - ./awesome-config.json:/config/config.json
     ports:
        - "127.0.0.1:5000:5000" 

Booting a machine

Make sure your host thats running docker is on the same network as the host you're trying to boot and it's as easy as:

docker-compose up

Now sit back and wait for your machine to PXEboot.

To bring down the pxeboot containers run:

docker-compose down