Apologies if this has been answered, tried searching but didn't find exactly what I was looking for. I have 5-10 Raspberry PI's coming in at a time that I need to load Rasbian (jessie) on. Currently I am just loading every SD card with NOOBS and downloading/installing the latest version, then updating the configs with an ansible playbook. Has anyone found a way to image multiple pi's at once with something like FOG via PXE? Any suggestions would be super appreciated. At the end of the day I am just looking for the best and most efficient way to image multiple units.
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I don't know what version of the Pi you use, but from version 3 onward it may be possible to boot from network:
- https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/hardware/raspberrypi/bootmodes/net_tutorial.md
- How to PXE Boot a Pi 3?
But it seems like it requires a bit of preparation and configuration.
At work, we just configured one PI that fits our needs (base configuration, SSH Keys, preinstallation of packages etc). After everything is set up, we simply create an image with dd which we flash on all new Raspberry PIs.
After that process you can finish the configuration with Puppet/Ansible/Chef/Salt etc. (for example change hostname and add static IPs)
flokoe
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Using PXE means net booting, that is, the RasPi is loading the kernel and operating system from a master server on the network, but not from the SD Card. Because PXE is only working on wired ethernet connections I assume your RasPis are all connected with an ethernet cable. For this scenario I have made a configuration for Raspberry Pi. How to do it you can look at Netbooting multiple “workers” RPi from a “master” RPi.
Ingo
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