Difference between revisions of "Netboot"

Revision as of 18:42, 14 May 2008

A netboot is a the process of booting an operating system over a network. The operating system image is stored and on a central server's hard drive (in this case the Core), and loaded into the RAM of the PC which is requesting the netboot.

In many ways, it is similar to booting from a LiveCD or floppy, but the storage media is on the network.

Hardware enabled netboot

Many current Ethernet NIC cards have a hardware chip (PXE-ROM) included that allows booting over a network. This option is selected from the BIOS configuration on the PC.

Netbooting is more difficult wirelessly if the wireless card does not have an embedded PXE-ROM chip. Check the manufacturer's specifications.

It the PC has both an active wireless and a wired Ethernet card, or multiple active wired NIC cards, it can be tricky to set which card to use for PXE netboot.

In general, direct netbooting from the BIOS is most successful over a single wired connection.

Software enabled netboot

Alternatively, a netboot can be specified using a boot loader on the local PC's hard drive, such as GRUB. See this discussion.

This can be configured to use different Ethernet cards and allows for greater flexibility, but there is a certain amount of configuration and Linux knowledge required.