PXE booting a Terminal Services client

[Hedghog]

Hi,

 

Having read some of the posts on this forum plus Ric's excellent guide I am looking for some further reading on the subject. The main area interest is not Terminal Services as such, but the client side. We will be using M'Soft 2k3 servers and some older hardware. As these older machines tend to be XP SP1 machines I was looking at PXE booting them directly into the client side software rather than running XP. It seem a bit of over kill to run XP and then to run a XP session on the server.

 

Cheers

[dhicks]

As these older machines tend to be XP SP1 machines I was looking at PXE booting them directly into the client side software rather than running XP.

 

What is it you're having trouble figuring out - PXE booting older machines that can't PXE boot themselves, or deciding which system to use client-side to connect to your Terminal Services machine? For PXE booting old machines with network cards that don't have PXE-boot capability built in, you want Etherboot/gPXE:

 

start - Etherboot/gPXE Wiki

 

You can skip the explanation and go straight to ROM-o-matic, where you can download floppy disk images for sticking in older machines to get them to PXE boot:

 

ROM-o-matic.net for gPXE 0.9.8+

 

The tricky part is finding anywhere that sells floppy disks these days. For a client-side OS to run on a thin client, try ThinStation:

 

:: Thinstation - a light, full-featured Linux thin client OS ::

 

--

David Hicks