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

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

On 24/1/21 5:10 pm, Chris Salisbury wrote:
>  > iLO will let you mount an image available over the control plane as a 
> boot device on the server.
>
> iPXE also does this, which is why I mentioned it. But either way, using 
> cloud images with cloud-init was my suggestion for network setup of the 
> boot image that you use. If you want something more barebones and don't 
> want to spend effort with extra userspace software, you might try just 
> setting the network up with `IP=` kernel arguments in your initramfs. 
> I've only played with doing that in VMs, but I imagine that it would 
> work more or less the same way on bare metal.

The setup I am working with has a separate 100mbit NIC connected to iLO 
on each server.  The servers are all in the dmz and have their primary 
1Gb NIC setup by dhcp from the gateway/load balancer.  As far as I can 
tell it looks like its only possible to use iPXE boot from the primary 
interface or secondary NIC not the iLO NIC.  I could have the iPXE 
handled by the gateway/load balancer but it would be nicer if I could 
have all the control/configuration handled over the iLO network.

My idea was to push a bootloader with required configuration over the 
iLO link and have that initialize the primary NIC to load the root 
filesystem and pass any information required to configure the machine. 
By doing this the control plane would be completely isolated from the 
dmz network. It would also allow you to configure a new server with only 
the iLO account and iLO MAC address.  You would obviously have to open 
ports on the load balancer to make it accessible from the internet.

cloud-init looks like an interesting way to pass the configuration.  I 
wonder if there is a way to manually pass the configuration with the 
bootloader.  It looks like you can use the NoCloud Datasource to provide 
user configuration using a filesystem so I could have the bootloader 
setup a partition with the configuration on the actual hardware.

Edward