Faster and more automated than PXE: access the firmware directly over the network via SMASH / SSH and send commands to load an image which starts the OS.
No manually accessing firmware to kick of PXE, so you can build a few hundred physical boxes in a second without too much effort.
SMASH is vendor neutral, so it works across HP, Dell, IBM, and other vendors.
If you're a decent frontend django programmer, and think we could make a business of this, get in touch. My contact details are in my profile.
Interesting. I've built a few PXE-/IPMI-based control and boot systems, but haven't run across the SMASH acronym before. Looks like it was a set of recommendations after IPMI 1.0 that eventually were incorporated into IPMI 2.0, important bits like secure shell (SSH) access to the console, virtual boot media and better power management.
I'd stick with the IPMI moniker, it's what people will know. :)
What about wireless clients? Is it even possible to diskless boot (PXE or otherwise) a wireless laptop? This is one significant change in networking that the article overlooks when discussing the fall in popularity of diskless booting.
Recent versions of gPXE have support for booting over wireless, but the wireless connection model (where you might be moving around and have a weak connection sometimes) isn't very amenable to having your root filesystem mounted over wireless. You also have to do more setup, partially because the wired discriminant of "use the network attached to the cable that's plugged in" fails.
So, it's definitely possible, but it might not yet be worth the effort.
Can network boot be done for Windows and OSX? I've looked around and never found a good tutorial or anything to point me in the right direction ( well at least for Windows, I havent really looked for OSX yet ). I did get it working for linux though and it was really useful since I only needed to push updates once.
If anyone has any links or pointers I would be very interested.
Recent versions of Windows have iSCSI support built-in; you can actually just export a normally-installed version via iSCSI and everything will just work (in theory). For XP there's a program called "sanbootconf" that you can install to make it work. http://etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot has some pretty good tutorials.
I don't think you can share out a folder and get Windows to boot using it as the system drive, but I think you can get Windows to boot without a local hard drive and instead using an iSCSI LUN as the hard disk.
EDIT: Oops this should have gone under 'oremanj' link (http://etherboot.org/wiki/start) I got the gPXE chainloading working already, took some trial and error.
I didn't mean it in the "Let me google that for you" sense, but meant "try looking for iSCSI related things instead of PXE related things - look here are some results which support the idea that it's possible using that approach, but I don't know enough about diskless Windows booting to be able to pick a result which isn't terrible and unhelpful".
