More PXE Magic

Kyle Rankin — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 18:15:30 +0000

In this article, I've decided to follow up on a topic I wrote about not in my column directly, but as a feature article called "PXE Magic" in the April 2008 issue. In that article, I talk about how to set up a PXE server from scratch, including how to install and configure DHCP and TFTP. Ultimately, I even provide a basic pxelinux configuration to get you started. Since then, PXE menus with pxelinux have become more sophisticated and graphical and could seem a bit intimidating if you are new to it. In this column, I explain how to piggyback off of the work the Debian and Ubuntu projects have done with their PXE configuration to make your own fancy PXE menu without much additional work. I know not everyone uses Debian or Ubuntu, so if you use a different distribution, hold off on the angry e-mail messages; you still can use the PXE configuration I'm showing here for your distro, provided it gives some basic examples of how to PXE boot its installer. Just use these steps as a launching off point and tweak the PXE config to work for you.

Simple Ubuntu PXE Menu

If this is your first time configuring a PXE server, for the first step, I recommend following my steps in the "PXE Magic" article to install and configure DHCP and TFTP. Otherwise, if you have existing servers in place, just make sure that DHCP is configured to point to your TFTP server (if it's on the same machine, that's fine). And, if you already have any sort of pxelinux configuration in your tftpboot directory, I recommend that you back it up and move it out of the way—I'm going to assume that your entire /var/lib/tftpboot (or /tftpboot on some systems) directory is empty to start with. For the rest of this article, I reference /var/lib/tftpboot as the location to store your PXE configuration files, so if you use /tftpboot, adjust the commands accordingly.

Both Debian and Ubuntu provide a nice all-in-one netboot configuration for each of their releases that makes it simple to PXE boot a particular release yourself. The file is called netboot.tar.gz and is located in a netboot directory along with the rest of the different install images. For instance, the netboot.tar.gz for the i386 Ubuntu 12.04 release (named Precise) can be found at https://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/netboot.tar.gz.

To get started, cd to your tftpboot directory, and then use wget to pull down the netboot.tar.gz file (I'm assuming you'll need root permissions for all of these steps, so I'm putting sudo in front of all of my commands), and then extract the tarball:

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The Linux powered LAN Gaming House

Michael Reed — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:12:05 +0000

by Michael Reed

LAN parties offer the enjoyment of head to head gaming in a real-life social environment. In general, they are experiencing decline thanks to the convenience of Internet gaming, but Kenton Varda is a man who takes his LAN gaming very seriously. His LAN gaming house is a fascinating project, and best of all, Linux plays a part in making it all work.

Varda has done his own write ups (short, long), so I'm only going to give an overview here. The setup is a large house with 12 gaming stations and a single server computer.

The client computers themselves are rack mounted in a server room, and they are linked to the gaming stations on the floor above via extension cables (HDMI for video and audio and USB for mouse and keyboard). Each client computer, built into a 3U rack mount case, is a well specced gaming rig in its own right, sporting an Intel Core i5 processor, 4GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 560 along with a 60GB SSD drive.

Originally, the client computers ran Ubuntu Linux rather than Windows and the games executed under WINE, but Varda had to abandon this scheme. As he explains on his site:

"Amazingly, a majority of games worked fine, although many had minor bugs (e.g. flickering mouse cursor, minor rendering artifacts, etc.). Some games, however, did not work, or had bad bugs that made them annoying to play."

Subsequently, the gaming computers have been moved onto a more conventional gaming choice, Windows 7. It's a shame that WINE couldn't be made to work, but I can sympathize as it's rare to find modern games that work perfectly and at full native speed. Another problem with WINE is that it tends to suffer from regressions, which is hardly surprising when considering the difficulty of constantly improving the emulation of the Windows API. Varda points out that he preferred working with Linux clients as they were easier to modify and came with less licensing baggage.

Linux still runs the server and all of the tools used are open source software. The hardware here is a Intel Xeon E3-1230 with 4GB of RAM. The storage hanging off this machine is a bit more complex than the clients. In addition to the 60GB SSD, it also has 2x1TB drives and a 240GB SDD.

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