Ipxe

Proxmox Datacenter Manager 1.1 can serve answer files to the Proxmox automated installer, which makes it a natural install server for an MSP looking after many customer sites. The use case is a customer who wanted every site built with its own naming, root password and SSH keys, by plugging a server into the right VLAN and booting it, with no serial numbers to collect and no answer file per machine; this post covers that booting and installing half, and leaves joining the cluster aside. It cannot match an answer on the site, and it cannot give a node a first-boot script, and both are shown from PDM’s own source. This builds one PXE estate for every site anyway: one boot image carrying a non-secret catch token, DNS TXT discovery so the image holds no URL, and a Caddy proxy that swaps the catch token for the site’s own bearer token by source subnet. It covers how PDM picks an answer, prepare-iso for iPXE, the DNS records, dnsmasq and the iPXE loop, a hardened Caddy that serves the whole PDM UI on 443 with 8443 closed by nftables, logging which token was used by name only, the post-installation webhook, adding Proxmox Backup Server, and the trade-offs that remain.