Fediverse memes

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Memes about the Fediverse

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It's not just Linux (feddit.uk)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Toot

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago (2 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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago

I fell asleep halfway through your comment

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Interesting. How do you host that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks 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.