# PXE Booting Utilities With FreeBSD



## wblock@ (Jul 17, 2010)

_*PXE Booting Utilities With FreeBSD*_ describes setting up a FreeBSD 
server to PXE-boot floppy, CD, and memory stick utility images using 
DHCP, TFTP, HTTP, and NFS.

Available in HTML and PDF.

Feedback and corrections are welcome.

Thanks to Carl Chave, Jeremy Chadwick, Sam Fourman Jr., and Lowell 
Gilbert for their comments and suggestions!


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## vivek (Jul 18, 2010)

We have couple of servers running RHEL 5.5 with KVM server. FreeBSD 7.x AMD64 installed as VM guest to run various tasks such as mail, smtp, proxy and so on on. This way we save power, and hardware costs. I was wondering if you tested automation with KVM?

Thanks!


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## wblock@ (Jul 18, 2010)

Not quite sure what you mean, although no, I haven't tried Linux KVM at all.  Having a FreeBSD VM be a PXE server should work if it has a bridged network adapter.


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## vivek (Jul 19, 2010)

I'm deploying RHEL, CentOS guests using kickstart. I wanted same kind automation for FreeBSD guests. I will test it out and let you know if this works or not. Sadly cobbler has not included support for FreeBSD https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/ticket/582 ; otherwise it is great system.  

Thanks!


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## wblock@ (Jul 19, 2010)

vivek said:
			
		

> I'm deploying RHEL, CentOS guests using kickstart. I wanted same kind automation for FreeBSD guests. I will test it out and let you know if this works or not.



It can be done.  The easiest way would be if the SYSLINUX memdisk will boot a FreeBSD image; it apparently only works on some.

My setup in the article creates a live FreeBSD system.  A FreeBSD install CD is the same, but runs sysinstall instead of init, through some hackery I don't fully understand.


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