Is there any guide to netboot NIXOS?

I have a small cluster, and there is one central node serving dhcp, tftp and nfs. I need to netboot all other diskless nodes with it.

The configuration of different diskless nodes are slightly different.

The nixos wiki introduces a script to serve the netbooting, which however does not meet my requirements. It can only serve one configuration.

So I guess I have to fall back to the standard way, i.e., use a dhcp+tftp server.

Is there any guide on this ?

I configured netbooting in BIOS ages with the pxelinux.0, but have little knowledge on netbooting in current efi age.

Thanks.

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Also on the search but have not gotten very far. tested various stuff

Tinkerbell

  • does not seem to be very actively maintained
  • lacked documentation on how to install the cli
  • interferred with my dhcp server (probably also more a documentation topic than capability)
  • I was unable to really debug anything
  • I don’t know how to create a proper nixos image type for tinkerbell (more my lack of skill than anything else)
  • apart from this its an awesome solution. I love the k8s approach with crds. Looks amazing from what it could do

Pixicore

  • same problem as @astrojhgu.
  • from what I read in the issues pixiecore will also not really play well with other dhcps in use

netboot.xyz

  • also looked good and I was able to get it running with docker
  • very easy to get started with
  • not able to really automate a build (or at least I was unable to dig up any documentation on this). I would like to have a nix config that will be shipped to new devices in my network automatically

matchbox

  • might be something. Still have to check it out. Using a terraform provider to set up bare metal infrastructure looks nice.

But for none of the solutions neither for using dnsmasq and its tftp server did I find a guide or a good tutorial that goes through the process step by step for someone that is not yet familiar with how everything plays together. It would be awesome if someone could help out here.

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