Pi - netboot, tftp, NFS and the lack of a bridge

Scothular

New Member
Oct 22, 2021
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Hi Folks,

If anyone can offer any ideas here it would be much appreciated.

I am running a cluster of 4 Pi's (v4, 8Gb), they network boot from a tftp server and mount the OS partition over NFS, this all works perfectly, cluster is up and stable.

However... I am unable to setup a bridge for client OS as as soon as I move the IP away from eth0 to vmbr0 NFS (unsurprisingly) gets upset, I lose the filesystem mount and it all goes south.

So I ideally need a way to run the guest networks over eth0 without a bridge, or to perhaps incorporate the bridge drivers into the initramfs (which could prove tricky, this being based on raspios (sorry)) - suffice to say I have been unable to make either of the options a reality.

Is there another way, am I wasting my time at this stage?

Many thanks!

Scoth

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EDIT:

Sort of got it working with this -

auto eth0
#real IP address
iface eth0 inet static
address 192.168.XX.XX/24
gateway 192.168.XX.XX

auto vmbr0
#private sub network
iface vmbr0 inet static
address 10.10.10.1/24
bridge-ports none
bridge-stp off
bridge-fd 0

post-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
post-up iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s '10.10.10.0/24' -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE
post-down iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -s '10.10.10.0/24' -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE

But it's far from a good solution, cannot be setting up port forward rules for each incomming connection that is going to get painful fast!

Any suggestions to improve it?
 
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