Re: CTF: UEFI HTTP boot support

On Tue, Jun 16, 2020 at 4:35 PM Rodney W. Grimes <
freebsd-rwg_at_gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> wrote:

> > I've been trying out FreeBSD with raspberry Pi4 (4GB) and wanted to see
> > what the state of HTTP BOOT is in FreeBSD, so I bumped into this!
> >
> > I'm curious if it should be possible to point to a img/iso directly (I
> > tried to use the img.xz unpacked it and make it available on a local web
> > server and that didn't seem to work for me)  but maybe thats cause those
> > images miss something, so arm64 aside does that work for amd64? I.E.
> using
> > the bootonly.iso?
>
> One problem you run into in attemtping this is even if you get an
> image downloaded and started that image is being provided by some
> memory device driver that emulates some type of iso device.
> FreeBSD does not have a driver for that device so once the kernel
> gets to the point of mounting its root file system it falls on
> its face with a mountroot failure.
>
> >
> > And on the other hand is there any doc on how to set up dhcp/http
> specific
> > to FreeBSD similar to https://en.opensuse.org/UEFI_HTTPBoot_Server_Setup
> ?
>
> Since Linux uses this idea of a kernel payload and an initrd payload
> to boot with it is much easier to get these 2 things over the network
> and then have a workable system.  FreeBSD does not have the initrd
> payload and that complicates things, you need a functionaly filesystem
> avaliable at the end of kernel initilization.
> >
> > I looked into https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/network-diskless.html
> > but that doesn't seem to be up to date (or at least it focuses only on
> PXE
> > and TFTP).
>
> Yes, old but workable.  I have a more advanced system that supports NFS
> booting using NFS support in PXE.  The only thing done via tftp is to
> upgrade the PXE running on the client to one that speaks NFS, then the
> kernel is loaded via NFS and the root file system is later provided
> via NFS.  The use of NFS provides very fast boots, and I do not need
> a web server to do it :-).
>
> > For clarification my ultimate goal is to use a few pi4's as "thin
> clients",
> > so eventually I will have to setup an image of the system with the needed
> > software (freerdp) but for starters I just wanted to check if pointing
> > directly to a img/iso would work and that does not seem to be the case.
>
> I would strongly suggest use of NFS instead of trying to provide an
> ISO image, as you no longer need to store the ISO in memory on the
> client box, and with a pi4 your already memory contrained.
>

Thanks for the tips, but I was really looking for HTTP BOOT info no NFS,
that's why I replied to this thread.

I might look into that at some point if HTTP BOOT is not an option of
course, but this thread is about a Call for Testers for UEFI HTTP BOOT, not
NFS and I would like to help test, the pi4 project just conveniently
touches on the same use case (an it also does have support for http boot
using https://rpi4-uefi.dev/) so I'm curious if I can test that way.

Other than the iso I can ofc attempt the dhcp+dns+webserver setup but for
that I would need a bit more guidance as the linked URL here is linux
centric, hence why some docs would help.