Windows 2003 PXE emulator

[Philip Rowlands]

Having just set this up over the last few days, thought I'd share with
the list. Two things to make your life easier:

1. Windows 2003 RBFG

New and enhanced since Windows 2000 Server, RBFG.exe (part of RIS)  is a
floppy-based PXE emulator. The nice thing about the Win2003 version is
the extended network card support; nearly anything from Intel, 3com or
Realtek will now work. This turns any PC that will boot from floppy into
a PXE client.

Don't break your license agreement!


2. ISC DHCP v3 "pool" support

It's possible to classify hosts into "known" and "unknown" pools,
depending whether the MAC address appears in a pools list of hosts.

This allows PXE information to be customised and delivered only to those
clients which need it.

I don't know what version this appeared in, but I found it new in RHEL3,
so I assume it's fairly recent.


(3. Memdisk - not new but worth a mention)

If you're doing PXE kickstarts and not playing with syslinux/memdisk's
funky menus, try them today. Boot BIOS upgrade floppies, Hitachi's DFT,
vendor's "system partitions" (Dell/HPaq) and Partition Magic over the
network.


Enjoy,
Phil