How-To: Unattended Ubuntu Deployment over Network — page 3 — TFTP server

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3. TFTP server

There is a couple of tftp server around there. The one chosen for this tutorial is tftpd-hpa does the job.tftpd package could not handle PXE protocol.

3.1. Installing tftp:

You can install tftpd-hpa with this command line:

$ sudo apt-get install tftpd-hpa

tftpd-hpa is pretty straightforward to configure, you just have to make sure /etc/default/tftpd-hpa looks like:

RUN_DAEMON="yes"
OPTIONS="-l -s /var/lib/tftpboot"

Then restart tftpd-hpa:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/tftpd-hpa restart

Finally, we just have to copy files to /var/lib/tftpboot to share them through TFTP.

3.2. What’s next?

Nice, we now have a tftp server ready to answer request, but remember, our DHCP server tells PXE clients to get pxelinux.0 from our TFTP server. So far there is nothing to get from this TFTP server, we need to populate it.

We will now install PXELinux files on our TFTP server. The PXE clients will be able to download pxelinux.0 and use pxelinux configuration files to provide different installation method. In every case, the PXE client will at least need to be able to get a linux kernel and initrd.img to load into its memory and start booting with.