Boot an Ubuntu ISO via iPXE

[obie]

A couple of reasons:

1. I'm basically deploying these machines in locations I don't have physical access to, making it difficult if I remotely update the OS (stored at some http location) to boot via PXE again vs sshing in and calling 'reboot' which would launch the PXE script once again
2. Clients have root access and can screw up OS and do quite frequently, it'd be nice to reboot and install clean regularly and remotely
3. There might be different data disks not owned by me inserted into the machine. I don't want to put the OS accidentally on a data disk or the PXE USB (if I write my OS to a logical block, I'm not guaranteed that the '/dev/sda' is not on the USB or a data disk)
4. I don't actually need persistence of any data the way it's used
5. The machine might get passed around and basically a memory-only OS ended being a security requirement. Perhaps the most important reason, complying with secops

If I were to go down this path, would you recommend I basically use the initrd, initramfs as my real filesystem. Should I basically take a real root filesystem and put that in a cpio archive and gzip it. Would that just work?


For these rea