Booting with PXE

This was a port of an old article from my gitbook.com page. The information within may be out of date.

Overview

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Goal: Enable PXE booting on the home network for both BIOS and UEFI machines.

For starters we need on bootable image, I have opted to use netboot for image sources. A suitable alternative would be pxelinux.

Setting Up the TFTP Server

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Before we can tell the machines to boot anything we need to configure the TFTP server. As mentioned this will reside on our Synology. -> https://synology.home.local

Enabling TFTP and Setting Up the Root Folder

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• Login to the web UI
• Click on Control Panel
• Click on File Services
• Select the TFTP tab
  • check the box next to “Enable TFTP service”
  • Be sure to set the root of your TFTP server below this box
  • (Optional) Under advanced settings you can enable file transfer logs
  • Click Apply
• Using your system’s file browser navigate to the network share (e.g. \\synology.home.local\PXE)

Adding an Image or Three

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I found it easist to start with using a Gen 1 machien in Hyper-V or even easier to use Parallels and build a legacy (BIOS) machine. And in order to have an image that will boot with BIOS, from the downloads page, you can choose either:

• DHCP
• DHCP-undionly

To keep things organized create a folder named bin in the root of your shared drive and copy one or both of these files to the newly created bin/folder.

Testing the TFTP Server

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The easist way I have found to test is from either WSL or a *nix-based OS, install tftp which is a client. Then you can use the following commands: tftp & get to verify that you can download the images via TFTP. The output should look like so:

user@localhost:~$ tftp <Your Synology IP>
tftp> get bin/<image-name>
Recieved 91646 bytes in 0.1 seconds
tftp>quit

Congratulations! If you see the #### bytes received, you can successfuly download a bootable image via TFTP.

Configured DHCP options for PXE

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