RPis use less electricity, produce less waste heat, are a magnitude smaller than even the some of the smallest form factor PCs.
This has numerous advantages over virtual machines or more expensive PC builds in my home lab. For one, I have a number of projects that involve leveraging RPis for compute in my home lab. There are a lot of reasons why someone would want to boot a Raspberry Pi (RPi) with network storage. The proper configuration of these various host and device firewalls is automatically assumed and is not explicitly covered in this documentation. Raspberry Pi OS references pertain to Debian Buster however, I have successfully tested this methodology on the latest Raspberry Pi OS (Debian Bullseye) as well as on the 64-bit version of the OS and it works well.Īlso, you should be leveraging firewalls on each of your endpoints, and especially on your Synology NAS. So, follow my practices at your own risk. I offer no guarantees or support if following this guide does harm or doesn't yield your desired results. While I have attempted to make this article very complete with safe command line and configuration syntax that can be copied into your own environment, you may damage the configuration of your home network, accidentally delete data, or cause ancillary problems (aka collateral damage).
If you are finding yourself getting lost with specific jargon, this may not be a good approach for you yet. the typical unmanaged switches used in most home networks. This guide will also discuss some the challenges integrating RPi network boot with Google Wifi as the primary wireless Internet router, and some other lessons learned about my success or lack their of integrating network boot on an enterprise-grade switch vs. While there are many guides out there on this subject, my goal is to bring all the secret sauce into one article that is comprehensive an geared toward Synology owners with home labs. In the end, I've figured out the nuances of booting a Pi 3B, Pi 3B+, and 4B on both NFS and iSCSI. It took reading many other existing blogs, as well as the official Raspberry Pi network boot guide.
In my spare cycles over the last couple of months, I've spent a significant amount of time refining my process for network booting Raspberry Pis on a Synology NAS. I've created a set of scripts that automate the Final Steps listed below, as well as help automate other administrative tasks.