TrueNAS/FreeBSD diskless boot?
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Hey everyone,
I would like to boot a physical truenas machine diskless. FOG is installed on a VM in my proxmox server and it works, but I’m not sure how to go about creating an entry for this. I’m rather new to creating a network booting environment, so you’ll have to excuse me for missing anything super obvious here. For what I read I should be able to go either with iscsi or nfs.Some background on why I want to do this, I managed to grab a Verint NVR that had one network port busted, but otherwise works perfectly fine, only thing is that the BIOS/UEFI is locked behind a password which I don’t have access to, and I tried everything I could find info on to get/crack/remove the password, but no cigar. The kit would be a small upgrade to my current one hardware wise, if I could just fit my current board in the case without having to take a dremel to it, I maybe would have gone that route. At the end of the day, I’m using this as a reason to get better aquainted with ipxe, so if anyone has any suggestions I would appreciate it.
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@mansanram Well I do have a tutorial on pxe booting different OS’ with FOG. But I can say I have not tried truenas, but its basically freebsd it should be possible.
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images
My concern is that if the firmware is locked how will you be able to switch the firmware to pxe boot off the network? Assuming this has a similar mobo to a regular windows computer, if its in uefi mode you will need to enable the network stack for pxe booting. The other option would be usb booting, but again you need to modify the firmware to boot off anything other than its internal storage.
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@mansanram said in TrueNAS/FreeBSD diskless boot?:
I would like to boot a physical truenas machine diskless.
I am not sure this is the right forum to ask this question unless you really want to PXE boot into FOS (FOG OS) to pull an image from the NAS. Then George might have the right pointer for you.
But if this is about boot TrueNAS you might find better answers searching the web as don’t have iSCSI in FOG, e.g.: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/qpmkfx/how_to_diskless_boot_any_os_using_an_iscsi_target/
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Thanks for the reply guys. I forgot to mention that the device either boots from a specific M2 drive (have tried other M2 drives and nothing), and if the drive is not present then it boots from the network. I already pxe booted winpe and some and some live linux distros in order to run the tools to attempt to resolve the firmware thing.
I was under the impression that though iscsi may not be a go, I could achieve the same result using an NFS share, I believe I saw some mentions of that in some of the threads that came up during my searches.
Independent of truenas I would like to get a nice setup going, though I have another vm running bareos for backups, FOG seems really convenient for backups, booting into diags, etc. In any case, I’ll read up on those 2 links and head over to the ipxe wiki to see if I can pick something up. Thanks again guys.
