[geeks] installing raw OS images using PXEboot

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

On Thu, 26 Jul 2007 17:46:24 -0500 (CDT)
"Jonathan C. Patschke" <jp at celestrion.net> wrote:

> On Thu, 26 Jul 2007, Lionel Peterson wrote:
> 
> > Not to be annoying, but what OS? Windows has tools to do this (for
> > windows images, of course), and I think Solaris can be convinced to do
> > this as well... I think the solution you need will be tied to the OS
> > you want to run.
> 
> At $ork, we use syslinux (which doesn't require Linux--it's loaded over
> TFTP) and boot whatever.  To image the winboxes we load a 10MB MS-DOS
> ramdisk with ghost and the MS LAN manager client.  To image the Linux
> boxes, we use syslinux to load Kickstart.  To image anything else, we
> use syslinux to load an NFS-rooted FreeBSD miniroot that dds an image
> onto the disk.

The last one... that sounds most interesting as my first need is to image
customized FreeBSD images.  They are TinyBSD images. 

TinyBSD basically creates an MD device, uses bsdlabel to split it
into desired partitions, installs a small FreeBSD OS to it along with any of
your own custom software, and that's it.

A raw image ready to be put on a hard drive.

It's the transfer of the image to the target machines that is frustrating me.

However, in the near and far future, I really need to do this with pretty
much any raw drive image, either custom created or saved.

I might give clonezilla a try if there is a pxeboot version, as well as g4u.

Does anyone know if the commercial software like Ghost or its nearest
competitor (forget the name) can be pxe booted?


-- 
shannon           | An Irishman is never drunk as long as he can hold onto 
                  | one blade of grass and not fall off the face of the earth.