[ale] PXE Installation Help

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Mon, 2011-02-28 at 12:05 -0500, Shade Alabsa wrote:
> I just recently bought an old Dell Poweredge 2650 rack server to play
> around with. While trying to install Ubuntu Server via CD it kept
> giving me errors and it doesn't support USB boot options. I was
> wondering if anybody who has some experience with PXE installations
> would be able to help me with it. In the end it's essentially going to
> become a web server if that helps at all. 

What you'll need is to have a DHCP server that you control (if you
currently have DHCP on your network being serviced by a commodity
appliance, the general rule is that it won't be good enough).  ISC's
DHCP server works nicely for this.  You'll need to set an option in it
so that PXE clients will look for a PXE server.  You'll also need a TFTP
server in order to host the boot loader or kernel, and an NFS or CIFS
network share (or use something like iSCSI) in order to access the
installation media.

If the system has a floppy drive, you can use a boot image from
boot.kernel.org to save the hassle.  Also, if the CD drive works well
enough to boot a tiny image from, that might also still be a viable
option.

boot.kernel.org (BKO) has a live Debian image, Ubuntu 9.04, Damn Small
Linux, Knoppix, and Fedora 11.  There are also some utilities available.
It's a pretty nifty thing to have available in a pinch (and if you can
boot from the media).

You might also be able to set something up where you have a DHCP server
setup on your network and point to BKO for the boot up image, but I'm
not entirely certain if that's possible or not.  I am not sure how
custom or not things are.

	--- Mike