Disconnect your USB from your Personal PC.
You will now connect this to your Homelab (finally!)
Careful
This guide WILL OVERWRITE your hardware, be sure you are setting up on the Homelab server, not your Personal Computer. See the diagram if you are confused.
But instead of the normal boot or start up, we will do something different. With the USB device connected to Homelab, we should now boot into BIOS.
Afterward, use the BIOS to boot from the USB device.
Yes, you're not going to a believe that a whole Operating System is inside that tiny USB!
As for the tutorial, Ubuntu already written a perfect guide that we can follow:
Just take note of these during the setup:
- Remember your username and password, this will be used later to login
- This process will overwrite your whole hard drive, think carefully.
When you're booting into the Ubuntu Server installer, you can follow my screen record here.
Careful: Just change the Xavier-IV to your Github account (otherwise it's pointless to have my public SSH in your server). This step is optional, if you'd like to connect via SSH.
Otherwise we can always set this up manually later.
Get your local ip address: At the end of the video, you'll notice how I check for my local IP address using ip a. We will need this later for upcoming setups.
Caveat
Different operating system boot into USB differently. Some would need to press certain F1, F2, F^ pattern on the keyboard. Some automatically boot from the USB.
You can quickly google: "<hardware> boot from USB ISO"
...where <hardware> is your Homelab server, such as Lenovo Thinkcentre, Raspberry PI, etc.
When properly executed, you will boot into the Ubuntu Server installation setup.
Once you can see the installer, let's head to the next step!