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This is the fifth part of my Raspberry Pi netboot series. The introduction with an overview and links to previous articles can be found here. In this post, we will go over the Ansible playbook I use to provision my Pis. This playbook’s intention is not to fully provision the Pi for use, e.g. it will not set up Nomad or Ceph. It will only prepare the image to netboot and set up my normal Ansible user for my main provisioning Ansible playbooks, to be executed after first boot....

This is the fourth part of the Pi netboot series. Find the previous parts from the introductory article here. In this part of the series, I will go over using a combination of HashiCorp Packer and Ansible to create an Ubuntu Linux image for a netbootable Raspberry Pi, using NFS for the boot partition and a Ceph RBD as the root device. The goal here is to show you how to set up Packer and what configuration is needed to run an Ansible playbook in an aarch64 image on a x86_64 machine....

This is the third part of my Pi netboot series. You can find an overview and links to the other parts in the Pi netboot series overview article. This, to me, is the most interesting article of the entire netboot Pi series. When I started with setting up netbooting, I had no idea how it would work. I had a vague idea that there was a kernel command line parameter, but no idea where it was interpreted....

A couple of days ago, I installed Mastodon and created my own instance. You can now find me at @mmeier@social.mei-home.net. The installation of the software, setup of the account and so on was pretty simple. The bigger problem is actually using the Fediverse properly. And I still have no idea how to do that. My timeline is currently still pretty empty. I’m not sure whether I’m doing something wrong, but it seems that the Fediverse is simply not compatible with somebody setting up a single user instance and then using it....

In this article, I will provide an overview of how netbooting with the Raspberry Pi 4 works and how to configure a server off of which you can boot your Pi. Several components are needed for netbooting a Pi: The Pi itself needs to have netbooting in its boot order config A DHCP server is needed to provide IPs for the Pi and the TFTP server. In this series, the IP for the Pi will be provided by my OPNsense firewall and the netboot options will be provided by DNSmasq....