Install OS's from network hosted ISOs

N

nry

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 10, 2008
Messages
409
I think I asked this before and never really followed it up or understood what I was doing.

I hate CDs/DVDs they are slow and take far too much time to mess around with and usually every time I want to use one I end up re burning what I need

I have a whole bunch of ISOs currently on a samba file share on my file server (hoping to have NFS setup soon)

I understand that I can use PXE boot but this still blows my mind a little as I have never really understood this, any one point me to some decent guides on this?

My ideal solution would be, boot from PXE and have some sort of boot menu with all ISOs listed on the network share, does such a thing exist? Or am I living in a dream world like I usually do? :D
 
Have you looked into Windows Deployment Services as a windows server role?
 
What OS? Deploying Linux over PXE is a snap. For Windows, you'll need to use WDS or something.
 
Windows 7
Ubuntu 12.04 x64 server and desktop
memtest would be nice too

Guessing its not quite as simple as I made out, although I did find one link where someone had hacked WDS to manage linux installs too
 
I would love to find something like this. I've searched for a solution on more than one occasion. There doesn't seem to be anything that works universally for any OS. PXE doesn't really appeal to me because 1. it seems like a pita and 2. I don't want the redundancy of storing PXE installation files and ISO files.

If I recall correctly there was a usb hard drive that could do this, load it with iso's and it had a bootloader where you could select what you want to boot from.
 
Ideally for me would be a USB bootable drive which contains a whole bunch of network drivers and some sort of browser for a network share Im surprised there isnt anything like this around especially with the ever reducing amount of CD/DVD drives in laptops these days

PXE is a bit of a pain as you need to change BIOS settings to use it
 
Well I seem to have found a forum with no end of answers
http://reboot.pro/15821/

Now to just try combine a few of these things to make a bootable USB with grub4dos on and access network shares hmm!
 
Honestly straight up tftp for linux, memtest, etc is super-easy.

For Windows you need Windows Server with WDS role basically, and you can chain that off your Linux PXE server rather easily.
 
FOG project. (free open source ghost)

Boot machines from PXE, select OS options from a webgui on the server and tie the selection to the mac address on the desired PC. REALLY simple.
 
I played around with FOG a while back. Pretty nifty. The only problem with it and others like the grub4dos is that you have to be able to fit your iso in memory. Not usually a problem for newer machines, but if you want to use it with older machines it could be hit or miss.
 
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