Serving SmartOS from your PXE server

Serving SmartOS from your PXE server

2011-08-17

(Quick and Dirty Edition)

Assumptions

  1. This guide assumes that you already have a PXE (TFTP) server set up.
  2. This guide assumes that you use pxelinux
  3. This guide assumes that you only want to boot SmartOS. Please adjust accordingly.
  4. This guide assumes that you know how to do all sorts of other things as well...

Instructions

  1. Download the ISO from smartos.org
  2. Extract the entire platform subtree from the ISO.
  3. Download a tarball of SYSLINUX and get the mboot.c32 binary out of it.
  4. In the tftp root directory, create a directory named smartos
  5. Copy the platform directory you got from the ISO into the smartos directory
  6. Copy the mboot.c32 binary into the smartos directory
  7. Update your pxelinux.cfg/default file with this content:
default smartos
prompt 1
timeout 50
label smartos
kernel smartos/mboot.c32
append smartos/platform/i86pc/kernel/amd64/unix -B console=text,standalone=true,noimport=true,root_shadow='$5$2HOHRnK3$NvLlm.1KQBbB0WjoP7xcIwGnllhzp2HnT.mDO7DpxYA' --- smartos/platform/i86pc/amd64/boot_archive

References

  1. Ryan's Guide to a disk install of SmartOS
  2. mboot.c32 documentation