I've also used PXE boot with LTSP (in Edubuntu), which allowed to set a park of think clients for a group of children in a very short time, just plugging old machines to the network and booting them so they would get their system from the PXE/DHCP/NFS server.Īs suggested already, if you want to set a farm of servers, I would really recommend that you use a PXE installation system together with a class-based network installer (such as FAI or kickstart) and finish the installation of the machines by plugging them to a configuration manager such as Puppet or Cfengine. It's especially useful with netbooks, since they don't have an optical drive, and I am quite reluctant to use a USB key to install my system when the network is quite fast. I've installed my last two personal boxes with PXE. It's definitely one of the easiest ways to install machines, especially when you need automated installations. We installed thousands of machines here with a PXE boot, using Debian's FAI, Kickstart and a modified BSD installer. DOES NOT ACTUALLY REBOOT YOUR PHONE, only the apps & processes. Your phone should be much snappier after using Fast Reboot. For our general-purpose infrastructure at work (a couple of hundred physical machines) we also use this to perform the installs of client machines - we've got PXE images of most Fedora/RHEL/CentOS/Ubuntu/Debian versions for customers to choose from. Simulates a reboot by closing/restarting all core and user processes and thus frees up memory. All this decision making is based on the MAC address of the machine. Touch Download latest version and recovery, and then Download and recovery. Press and hold the Volume up and Power buttons for about 15s to enter eRecovery mode. Use a USB cable to connect your phone to a computer. One more flag toggle and they'll boot off the local disks (and hence locally installed OS) from then on. Solution: Press and hold the Power button to forcibly restart the phone and try again. When they pass that, another flag gets toggled and they install. "Can you have multiple PXE images to choose from?" Yes, I use this functionality heavily to do my burn-ins - all machines start with a memtest boot option, then when they've passed that I toggle a flag in the build system and reboot, and they get the burnin boot image.In theory you can have several servers which contain different images, but I've yet to exercise that functionality, and I expect it would be a lot more complexity than it's worth in a greenfields installation. Windows install date (1st, original boot-up of new system) + Last system reboot. "Does one have a main computer?" Yes, the PXE system relies on you having a server (which I call the "Gold" server, based on the nomenclature and concepts at ) that instructs PXE clients what to do.In terms of setting things up, it'll take a while the first time, but I've got it all automated so a new PXE server can be installed all by itself if I need it. "Does it take a long time?" If you mean install time, it takes less than 10 minutes to go from "burnt-in" to "booted into the installed OS".I couldn't do my job nearly so well without PXE booting - all the other remote installation options (virtual media, getting a DC tech to shuffle CDs, whatever) are very poor substitutes. I manage a cluster of about 20 physical machines that are located on the opposite side of the globe, and they're all installed automatically without any physical intervention from anyone at the DC.
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