PXE Network Boot Server update
I'm very excited about the progress on my network boot server. I got it working yesterday, and it is pretty sweet so far. I've had tons of help from a few people and a number of online resources. Steve K. and his knowledge of Unix, TCP, and Linux' obscure intricacies combined with years of experience have saved me litterally dozens of hours in research time. By the powers that be, magic pixie dust, and some mad skills from David I can go from Vlan 3, where my computer has an IP address of 10.10.3.X to this new Vlan where computers and my dhcp server get 10.10.18.X addresses, Thank you! And last but not least my other friend Steve has also helped quite a bit with storage, virtualization and a bunch of other bits and pieces. Thank you guys.
This is what I can do already:
- Offer DHCP (for Vlan 18), TFTP, NFS & HTTP services on the new server, DNS is handled by the main network.
- Boot a pxe-bootble system to a custom menu which gives you a number of options:
- Install our standard Appliance build
- Clone or Restore the machine
- Install CentOS 5.2 x86_64
This is what I need to be able to do when I consider this complete:
- Boot the latest Knoppix distro.
- Install a few Windows OS: 2003 Server, 2000 Server, XP Pro SP2, maybe even Vista. They should finish Automagically, have the right drivers, have additional software like AV, and other utilities, and be updated and patched.
- Install Oracle VM manager from PXE.
- Install VMware Hypervisor from PXE
- Automatically Clone/Restore a machine completely. Turn it on, select auto-clone/restore and walk away, come back when the machine is finished.
And amongst a bunch of other ideas, these other items would be nice:
- Boot a computer into a computing cluster. Something like Enomaly comes to mind. Just because we can.
- Set up a Master server that allows clients to boot to it, like the K12LTS.
