I have an unmanaged switch and 2 laptops (both Linux), one of them needs a new install. Is it possible to host a PXE & router / DHCP server on one so that the other will see and boot from it
There is plenty of documentation on the internet on how to set up a PXE server but not much about how to go about doing this is you have no control over the network you are using, It might be possible to cobble something together where I use virtualbox with a bridged adapter but I really know nothing of the specifics, it’s entirely possible that there is an overlooked problem here or simply a better method of doing this, is there?
Yeah you should be able to configure one as a pxe server and dhcp server then just connect the other to it. It won't work if you try to set it up as a dhcp server if there is another dhcp server on the network so you will have to just have them linked to each other and not the rest of the network.
But it will be a lot easier to install from USB or something. What's the reason why you have to use pxe?
It's partly down to the fact that I'm currently away from home and only have one USB with me and partly because I wanna see if I can make this work, I'm currently scouting around, seeing if this thing has / can be done.
Providing I don't spot any major problems I'll probably try it a shot with a couple of VMs over the weekend, never do a dist upgrade on ubuntu, it breaks more things than it upgrades
Yeah I know what that's like. I have a broken roundcube and owncloud to sort out at some point.
I've set up a PXE server on ubuntu, it's fairly straight forward. There are plenty of guides and most of them include how to configure a DHCP server aswell.