Thread: PXE pains!

ok from what i heard you can put freebsd and windows on a linux based PXE, anyone know of any good tutorials that should be able to help and not make me have to do a serious amount of config changes?

Everything I've ever used points to loads of config editing.
You could try unattended (slightly less painful) although its Windows only distribution I think, but I'm sure that can be changed.

What exactly are you trying to do? Remote install, or remote boot and run?

damn i assumed this would be something bad packetexchange had done :P so dissapointed.

no its for doing installations over the network, we currently use it for linux installs, but was hoping i could add FreeBSD and Windows on it, save using disks for those OSes all the time

Hi,

For a commercial solution : http://nocmonkey.psoft.net/ can do all of those I believe.

For a free setup look at : http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/232 although I am not sure if it would work with BSD

Cheers,
Sean

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We've got it running for Windows, CentOS, FreeBSD and Debian.

James don't forget we also have gentoo and Fedora

(I was the guy who got the windows side working for us)

Jon

Originally Posted by James[UH]

We've got it running for Windows, CentOS, FreeBSD and Debian.

Which one? NOCMonkey or the deployment appliance?

Once you've got one Linux working though, it's not all that difficult to get another going We do all our Linux installs via PXE, very handy for when a customer mullers their server as well.

From when I did this a while back for Windows, it was easier to punt it off to a Windows server to deal with the install...

Originally Posted by Karl

Once you've got one Linux working though, it's not all that difficult to get another going We do all our Linux installs via PXE, very handy for when a customer mullers their server as well.

can agree to that installing over 100mBit connection, lot faster than having to attatch a usb cdrom and the rest

We have CD in all of our servers, so that's not an issue for us, but yeah, much more efficient having it done over the network in terms of man power.

Originally Posted by neilrbowen

damn i assumed this would be something bad packetexchange had done :P so dissapointed.

Heh, same.

If you want a nice easy "interface" for kickstarting machines, we recently introduced fast deploy (http://www.fastdeploy.com/) in to our management envrionment and the best bit is its FREE! It may take a little hacking about to work with FreeBSD,but it should do the job.
Main reason behide it was so the Windows engineers could build our linux machines while we do real work