How to PXE Boot using the hard drive
 

This is a bit of a stopgap measure, as I know the title seems rather nonsensical. I'll explain my full meaning in a moment.

I took over my father's network a few years ago from a tech who had no idea what he was doing. Half the machines had TCP/IP turned OFF in their configurations, allowing them to do UDP NETBIOS requests but nothing else, all were running Windows 98, and the 'server' was in a normal tower with a normal monitor on it and was regularly used as though it were a normal client. To be honest, I'm not even sure how much of this worked. We relied on some software that did not support record locking and used a 'database' of normal text files, accessed through SMB shares, with no method of race condition checking, and a physical token ID system to prevent software theft that regularly shut down our network during business hours.

I upgraded the OS to XP, rebuilt the machines, and ultimately moved us over to an SQL-based system written in .NET. Just recently, the Mono project's progress as well as the work of the dev team has provided Linux support. This provides the perfect opportunity to put the beefier-than-necessary server to work, and to turn the front machines into thin clients, which is what they should ideally be anyway. After all that discussion . . .

. . . the server is set up to serve both Etherboot and PXE images into the network within DHCP responses. The problem is that the machines are not propagating a DHCP request. The BIOS has a 'Boot from LAN' option, but a call to Asus shows that this is not PXE Boot or EtherBoot. I clearly need to boot at least /these/ machines from hard disk, and hove code there that will hand over control to the network kernel and so on. I was under the impression that this was possible, but I need two pieces of information:

- How much hardware support is necessary for network booting, assuming that a hard drive is available?
- How would I go about installing such a network bootloading client onto the hard drive of one of my machines?

I have considering using NIS and NFS shares over locally installed Linux, and this option may be what I ultimately choose. If you think my needs would be better served in this way, then I wouldn't mind being pointed at some resources for how to implement such a system. Thanks for reading, and I hope you can help me!

~Dakota

the logic of resorting to pxe when you have a hard disk without hardware support is slightly contrived, but i can certainly see your angle. you can defo use a pxelinux floppy disk to boot to a pxe server if the bios itself can't handle it, and so i'd not think that transferring that to your hard drive would be too taxing.

I don't think it's strange at all. I currently have a handful of older machines which predate PXE, and I use a floppy disc to do PXE boot. I don't remember the site where I got the floppy image from, but the ROM-O-MATIC site which creates chipset specific PXE boot floppy images does NOT work. The PXE boot floppies it creates are NOT Linux compatable--they complain that a Linux image is "not a valid image". It's a known bug, and apparently they have no intention to fix it.

Anyway, the boot floppy image I use was one of those generic boot floppies which includes drivers for most of the popular NIC chipsets. It works like a charm with every NIC I've tried so far.

I actually have a small spare CF card and CF->IDE adapter, which the computer sees as a hard drive. I'd love to know how to use a hard drive boot instead of floppy disc boot so my old Pentium 120 can be a true solid state silent computer. Currently, the thing makes some noises on bootup loading up PXE from the floppy.

For your purposes, though, a boot floppy is the easiest option.

(Also, I have a couple computers which have local hard drives for file backups, but I net-boot them anyway. Besides being able to power down the hard drives, net-booting makes system administration more convenient.)

I do not mean to hijack this thread, but, as my problem is similar, I am going to save the need of starting a new thread.
First of all, let me say that after a few months of installing a few linux "distros" I'm still a ToTaL linux noob.
I got a blade in a server that needs an OS reinstallation (RHEL (WS) 4.0). Normally, I would just plug in an external DVD/CD drive and be on my way - but the ports are block by a metal bar (I don't know why someone installed them this way, and it's only the bottom two rows).
Therefore, my only option is to network boot (the blade has Intel Boot Agent and it is able to "see" the DHCP server, but, ofcourse, there is no boot info connected yet).
My questions are:
1) Can I connect a PC running Linux (like FC6) to the blade that needs the OS (RHEL-WS4.0) using a crossover cable and have the PC act as the DHCP server, handing out a disk image of RHEL-WS4.0 or the RHEL installation disk images?
2) If so, what are the tools I need and how would I go about doing this?

Your problem doesn't even sound related. You need to get RHEL specific help, either in this site's Red Hat forum or elsewhere. Different distributions of Linux have different methods of accomplishing an install. I'd expect RHEL has a procedure for installing via net-boot, but I wouldn't know the details. I'm familiar with how to install Debian via PXE netbooting, but if you follow the instructions I can give you, you'll install...Debian. ;)