NASLite Network Attached Storage

Is there any way to boot a NASLite server using PXE? One server could store the boot image so that many servers without a floppy drive could boot off of it. Even if this is not possible, is a feature like this going to be avaiable in future versions?

--Anish

You can do it with a PXE Linux using Memdisk

Memdisk boot from a floppy disk image trough PXE process

More info @ http://syslinux.zytor.com/memdisk.php

Has anyone tried this w/ NASLite?

I haven't, but from what I read, it won't work, only supports these floppy formats, anything else is considered a hard drive and needs a mbr.

368,640 bytes 360K floppy (old 5.25")
737,280 bytes 720K floppy (old 3.5")
1,222,800 bytes 1200K floppy (standard 5.25")
1,474,560 bytes 1440K floppy (standard 3.5")
2,949,120 bytes 2880K floppy (enhanced 3.5")

Ralph,

I think the web site mentions custom floppy sizes, and if this was an image file, not an actual floppy, couldn't it be sized up to 2.88 meg?

Tim

The NASLite floppy disk images are not suitable as PXE images since NASLite does not use initrd. Even if 2.88M image is used, the existing NASLite architecture will not work.

I think that NASLite+ will be capable of booting via PXE, but only experimentation will tell for sure. That’s not a feature we are targeting at this point.

I was just wondering if the cd version did allow pxebooting. I am not very familiar with the whole process, as I have never setup pxeboot, but would really be nice if possible. Has anyone tested it out? This way you can have all the benifits of cd version but then not have to lose an ide hard drive.

It looks like the most recent version of MEMDISK suports the 1722 disk size. I haven't tried it yet, but that's my plan tonight.