All, I was interested in setting up a boot server to provide Arch install, as well as several other boot/setup options. I have existing Arch servers with ISC dhcpd, apache, vsftpd, and I've installed tftp. I have looked at: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PXE https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Diskless_system Both seem to have different pieces of the puzzle. The PXE page provides examples for use of dnsmasq, darktable, and tftp. However running dnsmasq would conflict with the existing ISC dhcp service and how would xinetd know how to differential between an ftp request that should invoke tftp or vsftp? The Diskless_system page, uses existing dhcp config, but then pulls files from NFS or NBD. I've looked at dozens of ubuntu and centos pages (which is primarily what you get when you search for PXE boot setup howtos), but most are of such poor quality, it is hard to tell what the salient parts of the setup are. My confusion comes in seeing how I can continue to serve the rest of my dhcp clients and also PXE boot requests (from what I can tell, it shouldn't matter, everybody still gets an address, and those non-PXE clients should ignore the additions to dhcpd.conf -- hopefully) Additionally, all other howtos show mounting the .iso loop and then copying the files to the tftpboot location. Why bother with the copy, why not just mount the .iso loop at the proper tftpboot location? If anyone know the answer to whether the PXE config additions to dhcpd.conf will conflict with normal dhcp clients? or whether having both tftp and vsftp served by xinetd is an issue? I would appreciate your answer. I think I can take if from there. If you have any other pointers about setting up a PXE boot server with this configuration I'd appreciate that as well. I'll add whatever working solution is arrived at to the wiki. Thanks -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
