Booting with PXE
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Goal: Enable PXE booting on the home network for both BIOS and UEFI machines.
For starters we need an bootable image, I have opted to use for image sources. A suitable alternative would be pxelinux.
Before we can tell the machines to boot anything we need to configure the TFTP server. As mentioned this will reside on our Synology. -> https://synology.home.local
Make sure that you have a shared folder that is accessible. For my testing I just created a shared called PXE and gave guest read-only access.
Login into the web UI
Click on Control Panel
Click on File Services
Select the TFTP tab
Check the box next to "Enable TFTP service"
Be sure to the set the root of your TFTP server below this box.
Optional: Under advanced settings you can enable file transfer logs if need be.
Click Apply
Using your system's file browser navigate to the network share. e.g. \\synology.home.local\PXE\ (this folder should be empty for now)
To keep things organized create a folder named bin in the root of your share drive and copy 1 or both of these files to the newly created bin/ folder.
The easiest way I have found to test is from either WSL or a *nix-based OS, install tftp which is a client. Then you can use the following commands: tftp & get, to verify that you can download the images via TFTP. The output should look like so:
Congratulations if you see the ##### bytes received, you can successfully download a bootable image via tftp.
In my home lab I am running an EdgeRouter X (ER-X) and instead of using the default ISC DHCP daemon, I am using dnsmasq. As such when configuring the dhcp-server options certain values will be ignored (namely global-parameters & subnet-parameters) and instead dnsmasq configurations will have to be made under dns-forwarding with the "options" section.
I found it easiest to start with using a Gen 1 machine in Hyper-V or even easier to use Parallels and build a legacy (BIOS) machine. And in order to have an image that will boot with BIOS, from the page, you can choose either: