The other day I blogged about how to extract the kernel and ramdisk from the DBAN downloadable image. These two files would be useful in the situation where you might want to PXE (network) boot a machine and have it wiped. (Something like this may be common prior to dispositioning a machine at work, or before you give an old machine away.) Whatever your reasons might be, I thought I would outline the steps that I have taken to install and configure PXE on a CentOS 5 installation.
Installation
yum install tftp-server
DBAN Configuration
After following my previous instructions on how to extract the DBAN PXE images, copy the two files (kernel.bzi and initrd.gz) to the /tftpboot/ directory.
mkdir -p /tftpboot/dban<br /> cp kernel.bzi /tftpboot/<br /> cp initrd.gz /tftpboot/<br />
PXE Configuration
You’ll also need to configure the PXE system to know what to launch/run when a specific command is given at boot. In this case we’ll only have the DBAN option, which we could run by using the ‘dban’ command:
/tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default
display msgs/boot.msg
prompt 1
## dban
label dban
kernel dban/kernel.bzi
append load_ramdisk=1 initrd=dban/initrd.gz root=/dev/ram0 init=/rc quiet nuke=”dwipe” –autonuke –method dodshort”
The first line in that file, “display” tells it to display a file as a menu prompt at boot time. The second step in this section is creating that menu prompt:
/tftpboot/msgs/boot.msg
**WARNING** TYPE ‘dban’ TO AUTO-WIPE THE PXE BOOTED MACHINE. **WARNING**
Start The Service
Now that we have everything configured we’ll go ahead and start the service:
service xinetd restart