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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

Are there any good guides on how to do this? I never once got it working. Also, where do you persist data? NFS share?

Yeah, it's unfortunately not the easiest thing in the world. I suggest cloning a working Raspbian installation to your server, pointing tftp at /boot (with the "--secure" option set so as to allow relative paths). You can then set up a rw NFS share on / for the Pi to boot off of (and lock it down with your firewall).

You also need to point the Pi to the server via DHCP, which you can do in dnsmasq like so:

dhcp-option=43,Raspberry Pi Boot

dhcp-option=66,$SERVERIP

I wrote up a more complete guide here a while back: https://adamfontenot.com/post/how_to_netboot_a_raspberry_pi_...

The other really cool thing you can do with this is install qemu emulation support for arm on the server and then use systemd-nspawn to chroot into your Raspbian installation. Then for any commands that don't need access to the Pi's ports, you can run them directly on the server. It's really nice to do updates this way, much faster than looping them through the Pi and its slow processor.

Love following your projects, by the way.

Thank you so much for posting these two options; The RPI kept sending TFTP requests to the machine running the DHCP server despite my attempts to specify another IP (the "official" documentation specifies pxe-service=0,"Raspberry Pi Boot" to which I added the filename & ip as per dnsmasq man page; same thing with dhcp-boot parameter)

I do not know if this is an issue with RPI, but some crappy devices only support TFTP from the DHCP server, you can solve this with two dhcp servers or iptables port forwarding.

Ah that doesn't sound too bad, I should be able to get it up and running, thanks for the instructions!

I have a new project that's almost finished that was a lot of fun to work on, writeup coming soon! Sneak peek, it's what produced these test photos: https://m.imgur.com/a/mDR8y

Thanks again!

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