Hi Guys,

I work for a maintenance company where we have a whole lot of different customers with different software. Each customer has got DVD images for their machines thus, we have a whole cupboard full of discs.

I'm trying to setup my Mandriva server to work as a PXE server where I can copy all those images and iso files to. Thus then booting any custoemr machine of the network., choosing the correct machine and then dump the image from my linux server to that local machines hdd.

I have my PXE server setup and working, but are struggling with the rest, like accessing my images and dumpning them to the local hdd.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

PXE is normally used to boot an OS disklessly. It sounds more like you want to 'install' images to users' disks. Is this correct?

In diskless booting scenarios, you will typically load the OS from the boot server, and run either fully from a RAM based filesystem, or mount network filesystem shares such as NFS &/or CIFS/SMB. Thus, the local disk, of there is one, is left untouched. If that is what you want to do, then you can take each of the customer's DVD images, and either expand them into permanent directories on your server, and export them with NFS or Samba, or you can mount the ISO images on loop devices, and export them that way. To me, it would depend on the customer usage patterns. If there is a lot of unscheduled connection by a large number of clients, then the limited supply of loop devices would probably not be a good choice.

--- rod

The customer machines will only connect when brought into the workshop for repairs. Thus when we need to reload the software instead of using a dvd we will network boot them from the deployment server, dump the image, take them of the network and then finish the rest of the setup.

So yes, I basically want to boot a machine with a hdd of the network and then dump a ghost image to the machines local hdd.

I have build something like this with PXE and CloneZilla. What I did was create partition images with CloneZilla, store them on an NFS share. When this is done you can use PXE to boot CloneZilla over the network, connect to the share and restore the partition images on the new client.

Got something similar working last night.

Boot up with a network boot.img which then maps to a shared drive on the server and then start a dos menu from the shared drive.

Then I can run ghost and point to any image in the shared drive.

When I started with computer a long time ago all computer had only dos on them and there was a menu called IBM-Menu, anyone got any idea where I could find that thing.