PXE Booting

[mmoseley]

Heya guys,

Now you have to bear with me on this subject my knowledge of this is quite sketchy!

I want to image my workstations across the school, most of the PC's are HP's. We have Windows 2000 servers (so RIS is out of the question, yes?)

Now PXE booting is a like pulling an image from a server? is it not?

I hear you can do this through Linux yes? Or does anybody have any info,

Sorry if this is a repeated question lol

Thanks

[Gatt]

Windows 2000 server does come with RIS. so this is still a possibility for you..

[Dos_Box]

RIS was introduced with Server 2000, so you're in luck there, and yes, it is just imaging (wiith a bit of configuration scripting).
If you read the 'How do you do it article on RIS all is explained. Its very easy and free. Just be aware that the images do not compress, so have a large HD to hand!!

http://www.edugeek.net/index.php?nam...viewtopic&t=54

[Martin]

Now PXE booting is a like pulling an image from a server? is it not?

PXE booting is where the network card itself (no disk-based OS required) establishes a connection with a server and downloads a program to run. What happens next depends on the downloaded program - typically it is another mini-OS that can copy further files or images down to the client PC.

mb

[mmoseley]

Hey, been looking around a bit since starting this topic,

Been looking into it and it seems like every server that I will be using runs its own dhcp server, which i dont really want, is this the standard?

Thanks

[rob.pettit]

Yer, the RIS server will need to be an authorised DHCP server. The PXE gets an IP address from the RIS server. Its the quickest way I've fund to re-image an entire a whole ICT room...before it was a ghost server, which did the job.

We had problems setting up RIS on a server initially, but realised its best to installed RIS before service pack 2 for Server 2003.