- Debian Network Installation
- PXE Booting a VirtualBox guest
Since I need to rebuild my infrastructure almost from scratch, I will document the steps, procedures, etc here. That way if I have to go through this exercise again, it should be easier.
I am going to be working with VirtualBox mainly because it is easier and faster than dealing with physical machines. My instance of VirtualBox is hosted on Windows 7 64 bit running on a AMD Turion 64 x2 Mobile Technology TL-60 2.00GHz with 4G ram.
My firewall, running Debian Lenny is already configured as a DHCP server, DNS name server, and DNS cache. It will also serve I am thinking as tftp server. An NFS server will also be required, but I don’t really want to run NFS on the firewall. I don’t really want to run the other services there either, but I have nowhere else to run them (yet).
Prepare for network boot
For more detail, refer to the Debian manuals here. This was remarkably strait forward. I just untarred netboot.tar.gz into the tftp root directory and setup /etc/dhcpd.conf.
VirtualBox Setup
My virtual machines will be configured thusly (unless otherwise noted):
- Debian 64bit
- 256M base memory
- 10GB virtual disk attached to ide0, sparse file.
- Network Adapter 1: Bridged to wireless card
- Rest pretty much defaults.
Next a server will actually be built and configured.
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