I spent another couple of hours to get the Raspberry DHCP proxy to get my RPi3 Raspberries to boot from my Synology instead of the DHCP proxy.
No successI found a website which said the opentftp server used by Synology works unreliable.
So now I configured my environment to boot from my Rasberry dhcp proxy (as of now is a RPi5 - but I will use a RPi1 finally which should be able to handle the boot requests) which provides all the boot files and finally use the root filesystem on my Synology. In addition /boot/firmware is mounted to the boot directory on the Raspberry dhcp proxy which ensures any updates on the boot partition of the provisioned systems will be reflected on the dhcp proxy server.
@ronr In order to understand the netboot process and configuration in detail I didn't use your scripts. Not sure whether they work with my distributed partition environment of a dhcp proxy to boot the systems and a nfs server for the root file system. Do you think it's worth to use them to add additional Raspberries or do you know upfront the distributed setup is not supported by your scripts?
I found a website which said the opentftp server used by Synology works unreliable. The scripts contained in pxe-boot.zip store client images on the Raspberry Pi that pxe-install was run on. The BOOT partitions are stored in /pxe-boot/ and the ROOT partitions are stored in /pxe-root/.
The scripts contained in pxe-boot.zip install and configure everything that's needed. I don't see them being useful with something of your own design.
I would suggest you test the scripts contained in pxe-boot.zip on a clean Trixie installation to see if they satisfy your needs (use pxe-add-bw instead of pxe-add on Bookworm and Trixie). I just tested them here with Trixie, using a Raspberry Pi 5 as the server and a Raspberry Pi 4 as a client.
If you find the installation satisfactory, I could probably modify the scripts to use a /pxe-images/ mountpoint, if present, where you would mount a network share as the base for pxe-boot and pxe-root.
Statistics: Posted by RonR — Fri Dec 12, 2025 3:55 am