Network PXE Boot?

[Thursday]

I have an older second computer but it doesnt have a hard drive.. i use a live cd but it doesnt work too well the cd drive is a p.o.s.

But i was wondering can i use a pxe network boot on my second computer so it can be used as a workstation and my current computer can be the host?

 

[AdmnPower]

PXE boot is for remote instillation purposes, at the school i used to work for we used pxe to remote image computers (kind of like norton ghost). I relatively sure you can't use it in the manner you're talking about.

 

[Rothzael]

These are always fun. I tried it years ago when I didn't know much about it. It didn't quite work then, but I think that's because I set it up wrong (very wrong.)

It's all a matter of getting your TFTP server settings and your directories right. If you're hosting from linux, you should have access to some good free servers there. If you're hosting from Windows, try tftpd32. It's free and includes other kinds of servers as well.

By turning off the DHCP server in your router and using tftp and DHCP servers from the same machine, it makes life a whole lot easier.

Experiment and let us know how you go.

 

[tlarkin]

These are always fun. I tried it years ago when I didn't know much about it. It didn't quite work then, but I think that's because I set it up wrong (very wrong.)

It's all a matter of getting your TFTP server settings and your directories right. If you're hosting from linux, you should have access to some good free servers there. If you're hosting from Windows, try tftpd32. It's free and includes other kinds of servers as well.

By turning off the DHCP server in your router and using tftp and DHCP servers from the same machine, it makes life a whole lot easier.

Experiment and let us know how you go.

This is pretty much correct.

You need the following running to successfully netboot

1) Server running netboot and DHCP, these can come from separate servers if need be

2) Some sort of netboot installer or image it can pull down via tftp like mentioned before or NFS or whatever means it uses.

You can netboot linux live distros, I have done it before, I have also netbooted memtest x86 before as well as a diagnostic to run memory tests on units.

I have used zen works with their linux netboot, I have used Ghost, and I have used bombich's netboot for OS X and I am not learning Casper. I have also used DRBL. When we were looking at imaging 10,000 computers at my last job we no longer wanted to do it from booting images off of a DVD, thumb drive, or external device. Those are great tools when doing a few at a time or onesies and twosies. Now, I set up a DRBL server, and it worked great. I created a windows image, and was rolling out Windows clients and even multi casting. The problem I ran into was, that it would not scale into our network due to some design incompatibilities. However, we did end up using zen works, and I am pretty sure that they are still using my shell script I wrote to automate the imaging process.