Physical Host

Using Pritunl Boot with physical host

First download the iPXE iso, some systems include iPXE support but this is often missing HTTPS support. The Pritunl provided iPXE is compiled with UEFI and HTTPS support. Using the commands below write the iPXE iso to a USB device.

wget https://pxe.pritunl.com/ipxe.iso
echo "65c60cffe1f578ffa7ce909e3e1ac57fe7eae241cf274194b45d19c89f7391de  ipxe.iso" | sha256sum -c -
sudo dd bs=4M status=progress oflag=direct if=ipxe.iso of=/dev/usb0

Secure Boot will need to be disabled to boot iPXE, it can be enabled after the distribution installation is complete. Boot the USB with UEFI and continue press ctrl+b until the command prompt is shown. It will iterate through network devices attempting to configure a network boot. This can be skipped by pressing ctrl+c once for each network interface follow immediately by ctrl+b. Once in the command prompt run ifstat then ifopen <iface> for the interface that will be used. If the correct interface can't be determined run the command for all the interfaces then run dhcp otherwise run dhcp <iface> to assign an IP to the interface.

Open Pritunl Boot and select an operating system. For this example AlmaLinux 10 will be used. Then enable the iPXE HTTPS Support and paste SSH keys into the field. The install will only allow SSH authentication under the username cloud the root account will be disabled.

Once done click Generate iPXE Install this will then display a iPXE Chain URL. This will be used in the next step.

Back on the system enter chain <ipxe_url> into the prompt. This will load the iPXE configuration and start the installation.

The system will then download the distributions kernel images to boot into the installer, this can take several minutes to complete. The Kickstart install script will then send the system information back to Pritunl Boot and it will be displayed on the page to configure the installation. Once this has loaded select the install disks and partition size. Both a public and private network configuration can be included, if the system is only running on a private LAN this configuration should go in the public network. The correct interface should be selected based on the interface displayed with an IP address assigned. When the configuration is completed click Start Install. If this does not load refer to the readme in the Pritunl Boot Repository for more information on debugging.

This will then send the configuration to the installer and the installation will begin.

The Pritunl Boot page will display the current installation stage the system is on until it completes and the message below is shown.