Welcome to marco-netinst’s documentation!

marco-netinst an unattended Raspberry Pi installation system which effectively replaces a PXE environment (not supported by the Raspberry Pi) for the installation and upgrade of the system. It follows a zeroconf approach, using MarcoPolo to detect an OS image mirror inside a local area network. It, however, can also be configured to use any server identified by its IP/DNS name.

marco-netinst is the common name for three tools:

  • marco-netinst: is the unattended installer, which is a fork of the raspbian-ua-netinst project that includes Arch Linux support, MarcoPolo integration, double validation HTTPS connection (the server does only provide the files to those nodes that provide a valid certificate). It also includes a set of tools to build a valid installation image.

  • marco-bootstrap-backend: An administrative interface that allows a manager to execute upgrade operations and reboots of the system. It is also expandable to include more functionality. It has two roles:

    • backend: Provides the administrative interface and keeps track of all operations.
    • slave: A daemon in every Raspberry that carries the operations commanded by the backend.

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