PXE via Thinclient

Description

This is a description of how to pxeboot various operating systems tool on devices connected to your network using the Thinclient and tftp-server contributions.

Hopefully, by using the files linked to here, and understanding what we have done, you should be able to add your own options/distributions for booting your devices.

PXE Booting is a facility for allowing LAN workstations to boot an operating system over the network. A reasonable overview (and fairly detailed description of how to get it working) can be found at the PXELINUX site.

Pre-requisites

You will need to have installed the Thinclient and tftp-server contributions.

Don't worry about setting any tftp-server parameters, as these are handled by the Thinclient contrib.

Universal Boot CD (UBCD) - the easy way

I have created a sample set of files for deploying UBCD to your devices here.

This uses memdisk and boots the liveCD over the network.

Log into your server as root and make sure that you are in the /tftpboot directory

cd /tftpboot

Get my preconfigured ubcd directory and expand it

wget --no-check-certificate http://batley.com.au/smecontribs/ubcd_pxelinux.tgz -O ubcd_pxelinux.tgz
tar zxf ubcd_pxelinux.tgz
cd ubcd

Copy in the required syslinux files (tftp cannot follow links outside of it's allowed directories, so you'll need to copy these in)

cp /usr/share/syslinux/pxelinux.0 .
cp /usr/share/syslinux/memdisk .

Download the latest copy of the ubcd iso from into the /tftpboot/ubcd directory and create a link to it (my default file looks for ubcd.iso)

ln -s ./ubcd<version>.iso ubcd.iso