I’ve been playing around with netboot for raspberry pi. Goals are:

• easier reinstalls when stuff goes wrong.
• diskless nodes - there’s a lot of problems with SD card wearout, NVMe drives are expensive.

One problem is that a new PI5 will not netboot out the box, requiring a eeprom flash.

NFS

What I have working is booting from tftp and nfs. One doc one this. This works but it kinda messy. The client has read write access to the files on NFS, so you can;t share the filesystem over a few different clients.

Read Only NFS

I followed this guide to get read only NFS, works fine.

Nobodd

I’ve had a go with Nobodd. It hasn’t been very successful.

Future ideas

• Run the NFS server on docker
• Drive install from netboot