Automatic Provision of Raspberry Pi
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Im googling for a wile now and not finding what im searching for so I hope someone here can help me
I am new to FOG and just starting to working me into this topic.
I have serveral Raspberrys around and for years I have the one big Problem, I pi is starving and then I need to do a new install, install all the software, configure it and so on. It would be much nicer to deploy them, and a bit worser, automatically.
Is it possible to make a image from a raspberry with FOG, and bind it to an MAC or IP address so that the raspberry when boot can automatically get the image, boot it, and run.
This way I could easily change a raspberry, bind the new IP/MAC and all is done, and can handle backups from my raspberrys on my server with much better backups than an sd card.
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FOG may not be the right tool for you with the PIs. Its not so much FOG but the PIs themselves.
First of all until the Pi3 the previous models did not support PXE booting. The Pi3 did kind of support pxe booting but you had to stuff to make it work. What I hear the Pi4 does a better job with PXE booting.
Understand that FOG is a block level imaging tool. So at best you can backup and restore to the SD card.
What it sounds like what you want is to netboot (boot the computer without the SD card and run the system on a ram disk) the Pi. There are instructions for doing that and you could use bits of the FOG server to support netbooting. So its possible with the Pi3 and later, but not directly supported by the FOG Project.
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Yes you understood what I want to do
You say there are instructions to boot with ram disc over network and I can use bits from FOG to support this, have you links to that? when I get it to work I would also make a new post here as a how to (when wanted) so that others don’t have to ask the same question again.
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@wuast94 This is what I found when I was researching this issue for another poster in the forum: https://linuxhit.com/raspberry-pi-pxe-boot-netbooting-a-pi-4-without-an-sd-card/
There were a couple of other ones that I found but it appears I didn’t save the links.