[TriLUG] PXE SERVER

[Timothy A. Chagnon]

Well I hate to give advice on the *evil* operating system in a Linux
forum.  Especially since I'm just about useless on it at this point.
But I will point in the general direction that may be more widely useful
to everyone.

Either way I think you are going to have a very difficult time trying to
get this to work.  Linux installers like RH's Anaconda, Ubuntu, Suse's
Yast and almost every other distro's have facilities within them to load
all files over various network transports.  These are usually provided
as soon as the kernel and initial ram disk are loaded, which makes PXE
easy or even possible.

Anyway, probably the direction you want to look in is Syslinux's memdisk
kernel.  http://syslinux.zytor.com/memdisk.php  You're probably already
using their pxelinux and may have the syslinux package installed, in
which case the file is already somewhere on your system.

In any case, memdisk is a very small low-level pseudo-kernel that loads
an image of a disk (usually floppy) from the tftp server (specified as
the initrd) into memory on the booting machine.  It then hooks the
floppy interrupt to point to that section of memory, creating a virtual
floppy drive.  It can be extremely useful for doing firmware updates on
hundreds of machines (with caution/checksumming).  It can also support
fake disk sizes up into the hard drive range.

Good luck,
Tim


On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 08:34 -0400, unctux at nc.rr.com wrote:
> Well finally I have my Pxe server set up and working correctly. I just
> did a fedora install and it worked just fine. What I had to do was
> create a NFS share and place my iso images in that folder and things
> work great. Next I would like to store default windows images on the
> server for various machines. I noticed that upon booting it looks for a
> kernel image and a default init.rd . I am wondering how to have my pxe
> serverl locate and push out a windows image just like it does the linux.
> any ideas would be helpful.
> MICHAEL MASSEY
> IBM/LENOVO
> BIOS TEST TEAM