Cooked myself an omlette for dinner, and I cooked it really quite well. I should think about doing that more often.
Tonights entertainment is setting up an iSCSI target for my new Pi, and trying to network boot off it (so I can talk to Mythic about swapping NFS for iSCSI).
I've installed dracut on the Pi to manage the initramfs (the normal Debian tools just don't cut it, apparently), and I've spun up a a VM (tayet - The One Who Weaves) as the iSCSI host.
I'm going to try to use the right terminology: iSCSI talks in terms of 'initiator' (client) and 'target' (server).
First, setup passwordless access by appending the contents of $env:USERDIR\.ssh\id_ed25519.pub to $HOME/.ssh/authorized_keys.
Config file for tayet - /etc/tgt/config.d/node001.conf (this is the 'target')
<target iqn.2023-08.uk.co.aaru:node001-root>
backing-store /srv/iscsi/node001.img
initiator-name iqn.2023-08.uk.co.aaru:node001-initiator01
incominguser johnathan partridge
</target>
(yes, that's not really XML.)
I'm just going to leave the link to the instructions I followed for node001 (I'm getting tired, and they are a bit messier)
Foof! I've setup most of a network root for the pi. Still to do:
- Install and configure dnsmasq on tayet ss a dhcp/tftp server.
- Setup ipxe so that the pi, when it asks tayet for a kernel, gets pointed towards the right place
- Find out how much of the iscsi client stuff I need to install on the pi. (Thinking, if the kernel has booted of the remote disk, do I need the client tools?)
- Dream about a shared read-only /usr disk
- Go though that all again, but this time with the USB stick (four times faster than the sd card, and I'm only doing the iscsi thing as a test/demo for Mythic)
Dnsmask doesn't do IPv6 very well, so I've installed ISC Kea, which feels a bit over-engineered, but so far so good.
I've got it installed and running with a tftp server defined in the config, but I've left it switched off for now because I need to check that it's not going to try to stomp on the BT router.
Poot. Just read the docs for Kea, and it won't run as a 'proxy' (that is, send out DHCP replies with options set but no ip address).
Bollocks to it, I'll get an OS installed on the USB stick, and then I can use that Pi for whatever.