I am researching on how to network boot with debian (or any other linux distro but i'll focus on debian) and i have gone through countless guides and found some useful information but i found nothing about making the live images on the pxe server from live cd images, but instead these guides have told me to run some commands in order to download all of the necessary files for the os to be booted from the pxe server, i don't want to do this i want to make the bootable images on the pxe server from a live cd. i have heard of it being done but it appears to be a long process and i want to know a quick way to get it working

Quick way would be to use a live distro like Knoppix or Slax that have built in pxe boot servers.

Have you tried it with memdisk, part of the syslinux package? http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK

I'm going over the wiki article you linked me to and I can see that memdisk does have the capability to boot pxe but i don't see any other information on how to get pxe linux going (i also saw that pxe linux itself is a bootloader used for pxe booting but i also realized that i need memdisk to make the contents of the cd images bootable for pxe linux) i also saw something else. It isn't in the debian repo server (i plan to use debian as the server unless you tell me otherwise) so how do i set up the pxe bootloader with syslinux. unless the pxelinux and memdisk parts are installed when you install syslinux

Take a look here :-

http://www.debian-administration.org/start/478

it says in order to put an os on there i need to download the "official etch kernel" but i won't be able to access the kernel sometimes for the OS's i plan to use in network booting. I just want to be able to make a pxe server and create a live bottable media from an iso file, and that when i chose the image to boot from the pxe menu it will bott up as if it was an actual disk

plus a little off topic, if a computer is incapable of booting from network is there a live cd (i guess a bootstrap cd) that i can use to get the computer to use the networking interfaces as boot media

Knoppix Version 3.3 to 5.x is the most easy way. Boot to the live cd, start knoppix terminal server, follow screens. Then boot a client.

If you want you can look at the files and folders and services that were created. Then use them to guide you.


As above some small iso's could be booted with memdisk. Not all and in fact very few stock distro's can be booted like you wish.

See also www.netboot.me for their take on a gpxe/ipxe boot. If you want you can use gpxe/ipxe to boot to your local ftp/http or whatever server or over the internet.

I'm guessing that i should install the NVIDIA drives from the repo server, but before i start downloading things which ones do i need to use because i don't want to find mysqlf downloading everything. and i think i made a bit of a typo, i am looking for a linux distro that can easily setup a pxe server (i guess we have established that that distro is going to be knoppix which abandons my plans on using debian) i also need some easy to follow documentation on syslinux, memdisk and pxelinux

Knoppix is very close to being a straight Debian.
&
man syslinux

alright i have a DHCP and tftp server running and the network card of the client is booting from it as planned i just need the live media to be transferred onto the pxe server from an iso file (i don't want to go through the trouble of downloading a iso file specifically made for the pxe media, i want to be able to do it from an iso since not all linux and bsd distros will have a pxe image)

how do i create the config file and how do i convert the iso images to pxe, i am running debian squeeze as my server but i plan to port everything over to other servers

Did you use memdisk?

alright so i got the system working and now here is my next problem
i moved the vesamenu.c32, memdisk, and pxelinux.0 files into the /tftpboot directory and everything worked well (custom boot menu and all) but i started putting iso images in the /tftpboot directory and it keeps giving me errors
previously someone told me that i can use memdisk to boot an iso image through pxe. i have been google searching for the answer but turned up nothing so here is my default file structure
i keep getting the
the image is right in the /tftpboot directory. what could be the problem here, is the syntax in the menu right?

i have been trying to use memdisk but the boot menu keeps giving me the error i mentioned earlier

alright i did it right this time, i used the tftpd-hpa dameon instead of the openbsd-inetd daemon, now the boot loader memdisk is finding the iso files (provided that they don't have spaces in the names of both the iso and the iso's name in the default config file) but i am running into another problem. whenever the boot disk boots off the the pxe server i keep getting the error that it can't find a live session file on any media. obviously it's looking for all of the files in the cdrom drive (which will either be empty or non exsistent) i have read that you can get nfs to mount the iso as a disk on the client but there are lots of steps to go through and i hear that you need to specify an individual iso file for it i want to only have to configure nfs once so that it has the ability to mount all of my iso files onto the client machine as a disk in the drive but thats not happening here, hw do i get the client to recognize the pxe server's iso images, how do i make the OS detect the live boot media through the tftp protocol instead of looking for something in the cd drive?

like i said before, i am using the live cd instead of the network instal iso (which is what i wanted to do since there are several live cds that don't have network install iso images) so now i want ot know how to get the system to read the information through the iso image booted with memdisk instead of letting it look for everything in the cdrom drive, this is it's default behavior but how to i make it look somewhere else (or make the pxe server boot it into the /cdrom directory on the livecd)