[TriLUG] Smallest Linux Live CD I can boot and run via PXE

[Ron Kelley via TriLUG]

Looking for the smallest Linux Live CD I can boot and *run* via PXE.  I have a pxe server running with a number of diskless boot environments (CentOS 5, CentOS 6, CentOS 7, etc) that work well for most servers.  However, not all my servers have identical network configurations (1G, 10G, trunked vs non-trunked ports, etc), and as a result, I have to create separate diskless environments for each network configuration.  Ugh...

I would prefer to boot and run a Linux live CD via PXE so I can manually configure the network.  Once booted, I want to ssh into the boot environment so I can fix the machine.  I have already tried running Damn Small Linux, Puppy, and Ubuntu 18 desktop via PXE, but the kernel panics because it can’t mount the root filesystem (probably expecting a real/physical CD image to be inserted).


Any thoughts?  Perhaps there is a better way?