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As someone using many, many Pi's at home and many times that at work, the preferred approach is to boot them all diskless (and for those that actually need an S

by zh3 3y ago

As someone using many, many Pi's at home and many times that at work, the preferred approach is to boot them all diskless (and for those that actually need an SD card, boot them off a read-only SD card and get everything else off the home server). This is so much easier than having lots of different SD cards/Pi versions etc, and makes them trivial to replace in the event of failure.

isoprophlex 3y ago
I have several of them, sounds ideal. can you perhaps link me to a good/useful writeup on how to accomplish this?
- zh3 3y ago
  Look up diskless booting, it's a very general thing on linux (i.e. not Pi-specific, although there are plenty of Pi-specific tutorials on the 'net. As a minimal first step, install an NFS server (which can be X86, Pi, other) on your LAN and make sure you can mount it from the pi ("mount $SERVER:/some/dir /mnt/tmp"). Then copy the contents of a Pi SD card to the server, make it exportable (see '/etc/exports') then edit '/etc/fstab' on the Pi to mount the (now remote) copy of the SD card instead of the usual root. That should get you started - beyond that, with some of the Pi's you don't even need to have an SD card installed (however you'll then need to set up things like DHCP and TFTP on your server).
  - isoprophlex 3y ago
    Thanks for sharing!
  - nsteel 3y ago
    There are also some pi-specific bootloader config options that can make life easier, they are documented at https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html#network-booting https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr... and from https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html#TFTP_FILE_TIMEOUT https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr... onwards There's also a tutorial at https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/remote-access.html#network-boot-your-raspberry-pi https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/remote-a...

by zh3 3y ago

isoprophlex 3y ago

I have several of them, sounds ideal. can you perhaps link me to a good/useful writeup on how to accomplish this?

zh3 3y ago
Look up diskless booting, it's a very general thing on linux (i.e. not Pi-specific, although there are plenty of Pi-specific tutorials on the 'net. As a minimal first step, install an NFS server (which can be X86, Pi, other) on your LAN and make sure you can mount it from the pi ("mount $SERVER:/some/dir /mnt/tmp"). Then copy the contents of a Pi SD card to the server, make it exportable (see '/etc/exports') then edit '/etc/fstab' on the Pi to mount the (now remote) copy of the SD card instead of the usual root. That should get you started - beyond that, with some of the Pi's you don't even need to have an SD card installed (however you'll then need to set up things like DHCP and TFTP on your server).
- isoprophlex 3y ago
  Thanks for sharing!
- nsteel 3y ago
  There are also some pi-specific bootloader config options that can make life easier, they are documented at https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html#network-booting https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr... and from https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberry-pi.html#TFTP_FILE_TIMEOUT https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/raspberr... onwards There's also a tutorial at https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/remote-access.html#network-boot-your-raspberry-pi https://www.raspberrypi.com/documentation/computers/remote-a...