I spent a few minutes installing and configuring NFS, TFTP and NTP, which were fairly trivial. The take-home points from NFS were:
- Set the daemons to use static ports, so your firewall doesn’t suck.
- Check out the mountpoint option, which prevents exports if an arbitrary location isn’t mounted. This stops the “underlying” directory from being exported if the mount didn’t work.
Later on, I might look into setting up NTP multicast to reduce the network traffic, if I have time.
After that, I started looking into the DHCP and DNS setup. ISC DHCP wouldn’t be so bad, but BIND looks to be a real bear to configure. Fortunately, Stuart pointed me to dnsmasq, a DNS server that can also act as a DHCP server. In particular, the dhcp-boot option may suit for my PXE setup.
Striving for greatness 