What is the status of KEA PXE booting?

[Patrick M. Hausen]

FreeBSD can perfectly well netboot if you serve the root FS via NFS as intended and documented. No mfsBSD, no pxelinux, ... just an NFS based root filesystem like BSD and Sun have been doing for decades.

Blog post in German:

https://punkt.de/de/blog/2017/automatisierte-installation-von-servern-mit-freebsd-und-zfs.html

[drosophila]

But I can remember that at some point it was no longer compatible with UEFI Servers so double check if the software you eventually go for can also do that!

That would likely be a reason to keep trying to get KEA to work; possibly I'll attempt to install a symlink to the actual install file that with an appended "ff". Should be possible but it's certainly an evil hack. KEA can easily filter by boot agent type and therefore serve different stuff for BIOS vs. EFI.

Die bereits per TFTP bereitgestellte Umgebung muss nun noch zusätzlich per NFS exportiert werden.

That likely was the issue that kept my attempt from succeeding. It did load the netboot-capable boot but since I expected this to be fully handled by TFTP I didn't export the boot FS via NFS (which would have been easy since NFS already serves selected datasets). A pity that one can't do away with TFTP entirely, NFS is less hacky and much faster. and if you have TFTP running, then things must already be secured against nefarious clients so that NFS won't be an additional security issue. For installers, one can just set all respective underlying filesystem permissions to be readonly for everyone since they're not sensitive and thus only manipulation must be prevented. The automated install might need sensitive things like passwords or certificates to be served ("Anschließend setzen wir das Root–Passwort, damit wir uns über die Konsole anmelden können: (...) ROOT_PW_HASH ist dabei natürlich durch den echten Hash des Root–Passworts zu ersetzen."), but a basic interactive install doesn't have these problems.

Thanks for the heads-up!