You know where a technology that could be cool has just gone totally wrong? PXE boot services. That technology has so much potential for being a infinitely useful service, but has been poorly implemented, widely varied, and has little to no documentation. In essence, completely useless and utterly frustrating.
As mentioned before, the potentials for this technology are mind blowing, and especially pertinent in a field like I’m in where we need to be able to get working systems going quickly in a employee work environment. I can’t spend half a day or more, getting the intricacies of your given standard corporate system set up, let alone customizing it for the user. That’s why we have system imaging.
That leaves us with a problem though. Either A. you have to have a server that all of the images are stored on, and have some way to boot the system into a state in which you can access the server, but also image the drive. or B. you can use a large external hard drive to store the images and still have the problem of getting the system to an imaging running state.
This is where PXE comes in. Instead of carrying around a large hard drive with all the images on it, and keeping some boot CD that gets the system to a imagable state, why not boot the system to a small kernel on the server, that also houses the images, so that you don’t have to worry about losing the CD, or the external hard drive, or any of that fuss. Just plug the system into a network connection, and turn it on.
But then again, that would be an ideal case, where booting from the network actually WORKS.
The reality is altogether much different. Unfortunately, PXE is extremely poorly documented, and rarely used. Despite the obvious advantages of easily being able to create running systems very quickly, and painlessly over the network, PXE hasn’t ever been a huge priority on any computer manufacturer’s list. Searching the web for setting up a pxe server turns up few results that are actually HELPFUL, and those that are, are generally specifically tuned to the deployment of linux systems where the creators of those operating systems saw the light, like I have, and made their systems easy to use with it. Unfortunately despite it’s simplicity, DOS doesn’t seem to be…
I hope soon to be able to provide a quick walk through for creating a PXE boot server giving the clients a simple DOS image, but for now, success eludes me. I have however been able to achieve success with some linux systems, and I plan on including some information there. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see though…
