jhvst / stateless-fcos

Booting live Fedora CoreOS via iPXE

stateless-fcos

Booting live Fedora CoreOS via iPXE

Once upon a time I ran CoreOS machines. Then, CoreOS got bought by RedHat. Then, RedHat got bought by IBM. I was quite happy with it all. I owned RedHat shares.

Next, CoreOS became Fedora CoreOS. When I upgraded to Fedora CoreOS, I found about live booting via iPXE. This was such a hassle that I put up this repository.

Introduction:

We want to make a boot sequence as follows:

BIOS -> PXE -> iPXE -> Fedora CoreOS

This happens roughly as follows:

[Client]                   [Server]
1. BIOS
2. PXE                  -> DHCP
3. iPXE                 <- iPXE image (`undionly.kpxe`)
4. REQ TFTP             -> TFTP server
5. iPXE BOOT            <- Fedora CoreOS initramfs,kernel
6. REQ Ignition         -> HTTP server
7. Fedora CoreOS        <- Ignition file, Fedora CoreOS rootfs
8. Successful RAM boot

To prepare for successful RAM boot, you may start from dhcpd folder.

Background

My infra is as follows:

pfSense router [1]-[2]-[3]-[4]
               [?] [?] [?] [|]
                           [|]
                    "muro" [1]--[2]
                                [|]
                        "peli"  [1]

In other words, my router has four ports. Port 4 goes to a computer muro which has two ports. Muro shares WAN and pfSense LAN connection to peli.

muro boots CoreOS from pfSense. peli boots CoreOS from muro. This project demonstrates how peli boots from muro. As such, throughout the READMEs the packages are installed on muro and the computer which is booting PXE is peli.

How-to use

1. Specify Butane files in .bu
2. Acquire Butane-to-Ignition compiler, see, e.g. https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/fedora-coreos/producing-ign/
3. butane --pretty --strict < example.bu > example.ign
4. Ensure that the Ignition filename corresponds to that listed in /ipxe folder's .ipxe files.
5. Start the http-server found in the parent folder.