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How To Configure PXE Boot on CentOS 5

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. Read more

DBAN via PXE: Automagically Wipe a Drive via Network Boot

One of my first assignments when I signed on with my new job was to rebuild and improve the internal repository server. When I started it was quite a mess! It only mirrored the last two revisions of Red Hat Enterprise, and didn’t have a whole lot of functionality. Now that I’m done it supports Red Hat 3-5, both i386 and x86_64 as well as the respective CentOS releases. It mirrors Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE and I added a few little tricks to the PXE server which allows us to build or destroy machines without needing to burn a CD. One of the features that I really like is the addition of DBAN to the PXE setup, allowing us to securely wipe drives on multiple machines without the need for any CDs or other boot media. Here is how I went about it: Create Required Directories mkdir /tftpboot/dban/ Download Latest Dban Read more