Overview

Most new bought PC's come with a managed Network card, usually supporting PXE. e.g. 3com's managed boot agent cards. This allows for PC's to be installed completely over the network, without the need for boot media. In the case of labs or a large cluster of similar computers it also allows the possibility of unnattended batch installations. The same technique could be used as a basis for diskless clients, or conceivably to run hardware updates which are only available via DOS such as, ironically enough, upgrading the pxe client stored in flash memory on the network card.

The administrator can control the installation via lcfg and by manipulating the pxegrub, dhcp and install objects which should (if necessary) rebuild the dhcpd.conf file, restart the server, create the grub .lst files, create the appropriate symbolic links, set up nfs exports etc.

The PC can then be rebooted to a menu which allows you to choose to perform a standard install as with the dcs boot disk.

It is also possible to flag a PC to (re-)install without user intervention the next time it is rebooted.