Tasha Upchurch

Okay Thank you guys for helping me get along. So I have the image able to boot to an NFS from initramfs, and i can remove the SD card! works great! except I have 30 or so of these I need to hook up and that would require crud ton of money on switches and cables. That just is not an option. I have a beginner/intermediate understand of initramfs and initramfs-untils now so i understand that i need to bring up the wifi device.. I know there is a "/etc/initramfs-tools/modules" file that lists the modules that "update-initramfs" will try to add to the initramfs... but. What "modules" do i need to: 1) load the wlan0 device 2) connect to a WPA access point? * i dont actually need dns lookup though it would be handy also once i have those modules loaded into the initramfs what re the commands to actually load the device and connect to the access point? I know that my current armbian uses network-manager and much can be done from nmcli... Any help would be much appreciated!!

And i found this last night. A guide to make u boot boot over network for a20 chips. Maybe it will work!? I wonder and i doubt if uboot supports wifi.. http://linux-sunxi.org/How_to_boot_the_A10_or_A20_over_the_network

This just in; my boards do have spi flash soldered on them. But not the fancy mmc flash that's on the more expensive models.

How about just using the sd card to network boot? Can i remove the sd card after? Is all this fel stuff necessary? I keep searching for "armbian network boot" and all i get are posts about people wanting to write to onboard flash so it boots without the sd card at all. That is not what i need. Isn't network booting kinda a common thing?

Thank you Blars, I have 35 or so of the "plain jane" OrangePi Zero's with no on board flash. But i suppose a u-boot on an sd card that I remove once its done its thing that network boots might work anyways?

Thank you for the help! Gnasch; is the idea to copy all the necessary files to the overlay fs and then perform the overlay and remove the SD card? Tido; I do believe the H2 + chip does allow for Fel mode. But I'm not sure how this helps in my situation?

Hello there! Its nice to meet everyone and thank you so much for having me! I have this great project i'm working on involving 30 orange pi zeros. You see SD cards are expensive when you need to buy 30 of them so I have been trying for about a month now to make armbian work without the SD card. The idea is to boot into the os get a few things running and then remove the card and boot another pi. I have tried creating a ramfs mount and copying/mounting (what I believe are) all the requirements and then using chroot. But that doesnt work at all. I'm imagining that outside of chroot services are still running and once they cant write to some file they decide to kill this system. Does anyone have any ideas on how to achieve this "boot up and remove sd" card functionality?