Diskless Installation

Booting a blank system into the OpenBSD installer without using local media can save you time and energy. A lot of modern hardware doesn’t come with CD or floppy drives. Of course, you could temporarily add a CD drive, but if you have a whole bunch of OpenBSD machines to install, that’s just an annoyance.

You can also use network booting to boot OpenBSD on hardware that lacks an installed operating system, or with a different operating system that you plan to overwrite. This process is called pxebooting, or diskless, operation. Diskless systems can have disks—they just don’t use them to boot the operating system.

If you’ve never worked with diskless systems before, your first attempts will probably give you a headache. Setting ...

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