A screenshot of a Wireshark packet capture showing some TCP retransmissions

Interlude: Setting up a VM to work on netboots

As I’ve noted in a recent post, I’ve had a problem with my diskless netbooting hosts sometimes needing several boot attempts to come up again. In this article, I will describe a short setup for virtual machines to debug such a problem. I’ve chosen to do it via virtual machines instead of one of my physical hosts because it makes a lot of things easier. Chief amongst those the fact that with a VM, I’m able to look at the boot process a lot more easily than with a physical host, which are all headless in my setup....

November 28, 2023 · 7 min · Michael