this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2024
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Fediverse memes

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Memes about the Fediverse.

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Elsewhere in the Fediverse

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[–] Albbi@lemmy.ca 93 points 5 months ago (28 children)

There's a lot more to it than that. Which ISO do you download? How do you make the USB installable. What to do if the USB doesn't boot when you restart the computer. Do you want to manually partition things? What the hell's a partition?

There's installing Linux, then there's confidently installing Linux.

[–] BorgDrone@lemmy.one 25 points 5 months ago (3 children)

ISO? USB? What kind of amateur hour is this?

I just have a BOOTP server running on my LAN that allows me to netboot any x86 machine straight into the Debian installer.

[–] PlexSheep@infosec.pub 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Interesting. How do you host that?

[–] BorgDrone@lemmy.one 1 points 5 months ago

I use dnsmasq on my router (I use a small server-grade PC as a router). It’s both a DHCP server as well as a caching DNS. Next to that it also runs a TFTP server. TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol) is a standard for simple file transfers mainly used for network booting.

If you tell a machine to boot from the network, it will basically request an IP through DHCP and with that DHCP response comes a list of available network boot options. Each option is contains the name of a file it can load from the TFTP server. If you select one of the options, it will download that file and execute it. That file will usually be a bootloader (like Grub) which will then take over the boot process.

I have set up a bunch of different network boot options, including a Debian installer, a small Linux rescue system and Memtest86+ . That way I can always network-boot any machine on my LAN to either install an OS or diagnose problems.

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