Member-only story
My Journey back to FreeBSD (2/n)
Booting and installing FreeBSD over the network (TFTP)
As stated in the previous article (Part 1), I have decided to migrate workloads to FreeBSD and to start, I will migrate hosts I have at home, namely my workhorse that hosts VMs and an older host that runs my runners for my pipelines (woken up on demand to save significant power).
FreeBSD is a different OS and with that it needs a different installer. Ofc I could prepare a USB stick again to do the job real quick — but we’re here to learn, so lets add a little challenge: boot (and install) FreeBSD via network. That will also make our lives easier the next time we need to reinstall any machine in our home network…
The journey to boot FreeBSD over network
TFTP server
I have used TFTP before so the research was quick and revealed I already have everything I need in place: a dnsmasq DHCP server setup.
Since I’ve published a container a while ago that is fully configurable through ENV — and since I made sure the image is updated automatically, regularly — I hade the perfect base to just add/enable the TFTP feature.
