Tails

hello,

long time ago it was asked for the possibility to add pxe-boot support to tails.
the tails developers team had no time to figure out how to add that pxe-booting possibility to tails.
now, there is an easy to implement solution available to make pxe-booting possible without interfering the regular tails booting process nor interfering the regular tails environment.

please give it a chance…

• 1’st step: comment out all entries in <INITRD>/etc/modprobe.d/all-net-blacklist.conf or remove that file completely from <ISO>/live/initrd.img
• 2’nd step: include all the missing network kernel drivers modules in <INITRD>/usr/lib/modules/<VERSION>/kernel/drivers/net/ to <ISO>/live/initrd.img
• 3’rd step: add to the <INITRD>/scripts/live script in <ISO>/live/initrd.img the following additional local_bottom() function at the end of the file,
  to bring down the network interface and unload the network kernel driver module just after the <PXE-SERVER>/filesystem.squashfs of tails was fetched from the pxe-server to not interfer with the further tails initialization process.

  <code class="text">
  
  local_bottom ()
  {
      local device_
      for device_ in /sys/class/net/*; do
          local device
          device=$(basename $device_)
          if [ "$device" != "lo" ]; then
              # set network devices down
              ip link set $device down
  
              local module_
              module_=$(readlink $device_/device/driver/module)
              if [ -n "$module_" ]; then
                  # remove used network drivers
                  local module
                  module=$(basename $module_)
                  modprobe -r $module 
              fi
          fi
      done
  }
  </code>

these few three steps makes pxe-booting possible.
for example, use the following pxe-menu entry on the pxe-server site:

<code class="text">
LABEL tails-x64
  MENU LABEL Tails x64
  KERNEL http://<PXE-SERVER>/srv/nfs/tails-x64/live/vmlinuz
  INITRD http://<PXE-SERVER>/srv/nfs/tails-x64/live/initrd.img
  APPEND fetch=http://<PXE-SERVER>/srv/nfs/tails-x64/live/filesystem.squashfs ro boot=live config live-media=removable nopersistence noprompt timezone=Etc/UTC block.events_dfl_poll_msecs=1000 noautologin module=Tails slab_nomerge slub_debug=FZP mce=0 vsyscall=none page_poison=1 init_on_alloc=1 init_on_free=1 mds=full,nosmt
  TEXT HELP
    Boot to Tails x64 Live
  ENDTEXT
</code>

please see also here for use cases and history:
https://redmine.tails.boum.org/code/issues/16236#note-14
https://redmine.tails.boum.org/code/issues/16236#note-26