Re: [tlug] Tiny Linux distro for boot loader?

[Edward Middleton <edward.middleton@example.com>]

On 23/1/21 7:45 pm, Chris Salisbury wrote:
> I explored using MaaS [1] with iPXE a few months ago and it looks pretty 
> cool. I ended up not using it because securing it over the internet 
> looked like it was going to be too much effort for what I needed to get 
> done at the time (which didn't actually include remote booting at all). 
> But for setting up the network, using cloud images ([2],[3], etc.) with 
> cloud-init [4] has been working quite well for me.

I took a look at MaaS and it looks interesting for automated 
provisioning in general but maybe not quite what I am looking for.  It 
looks like they are using PXE/iPXE for deploying images.  I have played 
around with iPXE before but run into problems with the limitations of 
the network card.  iLO will let you mount an image available over the 
control plane as a boot device on the server.  I figured if I could 
pre-boot a small Linux distro I could use all the power of that to load 
whatever I want over the data plane.  The idea would be to have images 
that were ready to run so you would have an effect like running stopped 
ec2 images but on bare metal.

Edward