PXE at the DC LUG

[Janina Sajka]

Here's a brief report on PXE from last night's DC LUG.

An audio recording was made and will, hopefully, be available in a nice,
compressed, digital format soon.

PXE is an Intel standard and is probably present on most NICs out there
today because it's been around for about 5 years.

NASA Goddard uses it when they need to reboot their clusters--though
they've learned to stagger reboots because having all the hundreds of
machines they control come up at the same time doesn't work.

PXE requires a PXE capable nic and an appropriate bios setting. That
bios setting might be (do just the next boot over PXE) or "do all boots
using PXE."

The first client server exchange is a dhcp negotiation which is also
capable of passing additional data, such as what file to load next.

The next step is executing pxelinux which is a lot like, and is created
by, the same people who do syslinux. And, you get to pass config data
the same way, too.

After that, the boot can continue over tftp.

Example configs, etc., will be on the LUG web site soon.

PS: Here are some useful links I've found about PXE and Linux:

http://syslinux.zytor.com/pxe.php
http://theo.me.uk/pages.shtml?page=remoteboot

-- 
	
				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175