Hello,
I wanted to see if anyone has been able to flash a device with Balena OS from a PXE server. I am having difficulties getting the devices to flash correctly.
Hi,
While this should be possible in theory, you are going to run into a few issues:
- Depending on what base image you use, you might end up just flashing any on-disk drive to boot to balenaos instead (this is what the x86 images do) you could try the qemu image, or if on ARM the RPi images should work, but you will have board compatibility issue most likely
- You’d have to customize the
config.jsonin the boot image to be a unique device every time, otherwise they will all compete for being the same “device” in balenaCloud.
I’m curious as to why you’ve opted to PXE boot with balenaOS if you wouldn’t mind sharing?
Hi Dan,
Thank you for your response. To answer your questions:
I want to be able to flash multiple intel-nucs on the same network at the same time to help lower production time. I was hoping it would be easier to implement than what I have found so far but that does not seem to be the case.
How many nucs? It might take more time to setup pxe boot than to just do config generation and (optionally) preloading of images:
We are doing around 500 units a month. I was also planning to stress test them from the PXE as well. We currently use the preloaded images on the USBs and that works fine but I am just looking for a more scaleable solution.
500 a month is a lot for doing manually. Are you a paid tier customer? If so I’d definitely use the in-dashboard support as we can give more tailored guidance there.
Hi Dan,
I have reached out via the dashboard support but am waiting for a response. Do you have any samples or documents available for flashing a device via PXE server?
Glad you reached out there, I can already see you getting some awesome guidance! Looks like they hooked you up with some examples there too (I don’t personally have one)