Installing FreeNas from PXE

[andrzejs]

Hi - hello!

I've got some booting problem with my servers that I was planning to use for FreeNas. The BIOS is quite old and booting FreeBSD from CD or USB does't seem to work. There are only four disk in a server and I would not like to use one of them for booting - better use them for storage.

I thought, one could try to boot them from the network instead - I booted Debian from my PXE server.

Now to my question:

Where do I find a PXE-bootable image of FreeNas?
or How to make such an image myself?

Thank You for any clues...

 

[aidasan]

Hi
I personnaly don't know but google find this :

http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/pxe.html

http://people.freebsd.org/~dwhite/pxeboot.html

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=20040

 

[cyberjock]

If your computer is so old it won't boot from CDROM it likely won't make a good system for FreeNAS anyway.

Unless you plan to use UFS you need at least 6GB of RAM. Pretty much any system that supports 6GB of RAM will support CDROM and USB booting.

 

[andrzejs]

Well,

The computers (16 of them) are not that bad. They actually boot Windows from CD, I have used them with 64-bits Centos or Debian, they support 4 SATA disks, multiple 1GB/s NICs and at least 4GB memory . I try to find some use for them - FreeNas is one option.

In Booting menu there was this "F5 - PXE boot" option. I thought that obtaining a pxe-bootable image would make my life easier...

Thank You for all the information, I'll try...