PXE Installation from Microsoft RIS
 

Hello to all.

I've developed a custom desktop image for my company using Redhat enterprise desktop 4 & kickstart. The CD image works great, but unfortunately, a lot of the PC's we need to install it on don't have CD rom's, and you can't boot the 2.6 kernel from a floppy disk as the boot image doesn't fit on the disk.
Also, the hardware we are using doesn't support boot from USB (damn old junk)

I've tried installing from a Redhat 3 boot disk using FTP installation, but you have to boot from the same version to get it to work.

I've tried using Microsoft RIS to boot the redhat boot image (not the entire kickstart installation, just the disk boot image) but I get the following error:

Transferring image file.. (sits on that for a while)

THEN

Boot Failed.

Has anyone got any ideas or suggestions? I'm using a product called "EM Boot RIS Menu editor 2.0" to extend the functionality of the RIS Server. We're running Windows 2K3 server.

The testing i'm doing is in a vmware environment (I'm not sure that that's not what's causing the problem however).

Does anyone have any suggestions on either:

How I can resolve the issue

OR

Any other suggestions of how I can start the install process on these machines.

Thanks in advance

If one of them has a CD, you could install it on that one and then use that box as the TFTP server and use PXE boot to install on the other machines.

I don't know much about the RIS servers on Windows so I'm just guessing here. But you might be able to find a TFTP server for windows... Here's a link about setting up a TFTP server on windows to load uClinux. Maybe you can modify it to suit your needs...

RIS uses TFTP server for serving the images. I'd dump RIS but I need it to rollout windows images.

Help
 

Does anyone have any ideas on this problem, or how I can install this image???

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