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choltham 11-10-2011 02:05 AM

PXE Server with menu to select mountable ISO
 
Hi all

I'm new to this forum, my first post, but I thought it would be a good place to start since I haven't found anything anywhere else that has been much help.

I work at a small IT company servicing mainly home users but the occasional corporate client.

I am looking to put a machine in place for ourselves that will perform the following roles:

1. DHCP
2. Proxy
3. Cache
4. Usage reporting
5. PXE network booting.

Points 1 through 4 are easy enough, I have done these many times before, it's point 5 I need some assistance/advise/recommendations with.

It wont be just a basic 'boot to XYZ Distro to use a machine' network boot, what I am looking to do is copy on ISO's of all out bootable discs (various diagnostic tools, Windows, Mac & Linux installation discs, etc) onto this machine and have a network boot menu, where we would connect a PC to the LAN, start it with network boot, then select out of a list which ISO to mount and boot from, and load that up on the client machine, either to select from the diagnostics to run, or do a full installation of an operating system.

In the office we mainly work with Windows & Microsoft products, but I have tinkered a bit with different Linux distros and normally can find my way around.

So my questions would be: Is this setup even possible? What would the best distro to use? And if everything works, how easy would it be to add, change or remove items from this menu?

On hand I have SuSE 9.2 & 10.1, uBuntu (unsure which version), Redhat 6 & 7, Fedora (version?), and one or 2 others that are buried in a pile somewhere, if I could use one of these it would be great, but I am able to download any other that may be better to use.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give!
Chris

roreilly 11-10-2011 03:40 PM

Hello choltham,

Take a look at this article: http://www.howtoforge.com/setting-up...n-debian-lenny

I would suggest that you use this guideline to configure the pxe server. I have done this successfully for installing several linux versions.

Additionally, in my environment, one of the options is to boot clonezilla, and I can then also apply pre-configured system images to specific machine types
via pxe such as Windows installs.

Regards,

Rob.


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