pxe-update is a shell script to automate maintenance of a PXE server. It's meant to be run via a daily cron job.

Basically, it downloads netboot images of Debian-based distributions to the configured TFTP directory (typically /srv/tftp), and builds PXE menu files to present the available releases in a nice nested menu. However, advanced configuration allows one to do more, like:

• BIOS or UEFI boot
• Live CD boot via NFS
• Customizable keymap
• Customizable graphical theme

See the pxe-update.conf (5) manpage for all supported features.

pxe-update [OPTION]... [DISTRIBUTION:CODENAME|SUITE]...

OPTIONS:
  -r	Remove unrequested distributions.
  -v	Verbose mode.
  -d	Debug mode.
  -h	Print this help message.

Each argument is a release to download. A release takes the form of a
DISTRIBUTION, followed by a colon, followed by a CODENAME or a SUITE.

DISTRIBUTION can be "debian", "ubuntu" or "mint".
CODENAME is a one-word release codename like "wheezy", "raring" or "sarah"
SUITE is a suite name like "stable" or "devel". Valid suite names are:

Debian: "stable", "testing", "unstable" "oldstable" and "oldoldstable".
Ubuntu: "stable", "devel" (or "unstable"), "oldstable", "lts" and "oldlts".
Mint: "stable" and "lmde".

If proprerly configured through the configuration file, it can be just called as-is without any options, and it will do everything automagically (except downloading ISO images; also note that Linux Mint doesn't release netboot images, and thus supports only ISO mode).

pxe-update uses the SYSLINUX elements from the "main" release (the first one), and since Linux Mint doesn't release netboot images, the first release must be "debian" or "ubuntu".

Be aware that pxe-update downloads a lot from Internet. If you have a limited data plan, be very careful of the amount of data downloaded every time the program is run.

For this very reason, it is a deliberate choice from the author not to automatically download Live CD images, and delegate the responsibilty of managing the Live CD repository to the user.

Also, since all the data is updated every time, even when the files don't change, their timestamp is still updated; if you have a snapshot-based backup policy, you may want to exclude the whole TFTP directory from your backups (since everything can be easily recovered from Internet anyway).

pxe-update needs lftp and shell-script-helper. Those are hard dependencies, the script can't work without them.

Unless the TFTP directory is intended to be exported to another host (in the case of a DMZ for example), you will obviously need a TFTP server like tftpd-hpa or atftpd to serve the files to clients.

Additionally, to use the Live CD boot feature, the script needs fuseiso (not fuseiso9660). It also uses rsync to avoid copying already up-to-date files (without it, the script will use cp, which will blindly copy everything).

To process old releases (before Debian Wheezy), the script uses identify and convert from imagemagick to resize the splash screens (without them, the splash screens will look distorted).

UEFI boot is still quite rudimentary, but works. It's only available for the first release listed, and only if it's a Debian release greater or equal than 8 (Jessie). If this condition is met, it's automatically enabled, there is nothing else to do.

To customize the keyboard mapping for BIOS boot (which uses PXELINUX), you'll need the keytab-lilo tool (distributed with LILO), and keyboard mappings from console-data. Here's an example for a french keyboard:

keytab-lilo fr > fr.ktl

For UEFI boot (which uses GRUB), you'll need the grub-kbdcomp tool (distributed with GRUB), and the keyboard mappings from xkb:

grub-kbdcomp -o fr.gkb fr

Both tools are normally able to find the source keyboard mappings on their own. For more information, please refer to their respective documentation.

Here are two examples showing how to configure ISC DHCP server for PXE boot. If you use another DHCP server, please refer to its own documentation.

If you don't care about UEFI boot, the configuration is very simple and consists of two lines (of course, replace 192.168.1.1 by your own TFTP server's IP address):

# PXE server address
next-server 192.168.1.1;

# BOOTP file
filename "pxelinux.0";

To enable both BIOS and UEFI boot, the configuration is slightly longer. When a client sends a DHCP request, it normally include its architecture type, which allows the DHCP server to act on it and send the right filename in the answer. Such a configuration can be written like that:

# PXE server address
next-server 192.168.1.1;

# BIOS/UEFI BOOTP files
option arch code 93 = unsigned integer 16;
if option arch = 00:00 {
  filename "pxelinux.0";
} elsif option arch = 00:06 {
  filename "bootnetia32.efi";
} elsif option arch = 00:07 or option arch = 00:09 {
  filename "bootnetx64.efi";
}

If you need to support other (less common) hardware, please refer to RFC 4578 for other supported architecture types.

Copyright © 2018 Raphaël Halimi [email protected]

Everything in this distribution is licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later.