[syslinux] PXE Boot Solution

Matthew Holevinski eylusion at gmail.com
Tue Jun 2 11:48:24 PDT 2009


Once again I feel horrible for asking something I feel is completely
off topic for this group but everyone is so extremely helpful :(

In my organization, we basically use Windows PE disks, to do our
re-images, after some time and a lot of help from this group
I was able to get a thumb drive to successfully work as a Windows PE
bootloader, as well as some other utilities like wiping the
hard drive, and what not.

I have never considered using PXE booting as an option, granted I
assume it will only work just on my subnet or at least that's all
I'll really care to use it on, say for whenever someone brings me a
machine I need to wipe/re-image and set back up for them.

I've never setup a pxe server, but I was curious what all that would
entail, is it something i could setup on my windows box, or would
i need to setup a dedicated server for this purpose, and what all
could I do with it? Could I get it to recognize machines and wipe them
and re-image them for me without the need for a cd or thumbdrive?
Maybe an autodetection script to tell what make/model the machine is
so it knows what image to apply or a menu with an image selection to
apply to the machine? Like I said I'm not really all to sure what all
this would entail, but if someone has the time or initiative to maybe
respond and tell me what kind of setup they have for the technician
environment? We've unfortunately moved away from ghost images and
started using WIM's which are nice but i'm not really too big a fan
of them, our re-image process uses an HTA file that runs some sort of
like 14 page vb script to figure out what make model the machine is
and which of 4 or 5 vanilla images to apply and then another wim image
of drivers and then another with basic applications for 1 of the 4
environments.

Honestly, it would be great, if i could reboot say 20 machines, have
them all pxe boot from my machine and then sit back and watch my
machine
multicast out an image to all of them. Not really sure what I'm
talking about so be gentle.

Matthew Holevinski




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