Arch Linux

Goran

Member

Registered: 2012-01-24

Posts: 92

Network (PXE) boot over home router - can I use router's DHCP service?

I was reading the PXE boot guide on the arch wiki: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PXE

It talks about setting up a dhcp server on the machine that hosts the ISO, but there is already a dhcp service on the home router, so I'm wondering if that's going to cause problems, and what people typically do in these cases.

Is there a way to use the existing dhcp service on the router (to configure it in some way) so that the target machine (the client) would be able to find the required files on the host?

Any insight would be appreciated.

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: Network (PXE) boot over home router - can I use router's DHCP service?

That all depends on how configurable your routers DHCP server is. Does it let you set values for the PXE options? For consumer routers this is pretty much always a no unless you've flashed the firmware with something like OpenWRT or LEDE.

If these options aren't available to you then you need to disable your routers DHCP server and use a different one, for example dnsmasq as covered in the wiki. Running more than one DHCP server on the same network is a bad idea as you can't tell which one will respond to your client first.

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aur - dotfiles

Goran

Member

Registered: 2012-01-24

Posts: 92

Re: Network (PXE) boot over home router - can I use router's DHCP service?

It's a basic home router, with stock firmware, so it has no advanced options for dhcp. I guess I'll just disable it when I try to get this working.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Another thing I wanted to ask, although I'm not sure if this is the right place, but anyway: If I wanted to boot something other than an arch iso, like a xubuntu live iso, or the plop boot manager (which you recommended in my other thread), I assume that the procedure for that is essentially the same, just with different paths, and a different .cfg file (to replace archiso.cfg), or is it completely different?

There is some documentation about booting over the network on the plop site (https://www.plop.at/en/ploplinux/live/n … linux.html), but it's very confusing, and it seems to involve plop archives which are greater than a gigabyte ... Is there a way to just mount the plop floppy disk image instead of the arch iso, and basically use the same procedure as outlined in the arch wiki?