Using the PXE to boot into a Linux LiveCD
Hey,
We've been messing about with the idea of expanding the use of our K2000 when it comes to PXE.
Seeing as we've got plenty of machines in the building still being around the GX620 era (Extremely old so to say) they barely manage to run windows 7 so we figured, is there any way we could use the PXE to boot into a prepared live OS?
Is this even possible? The KBE we're using now are the ones generated through the K2000 with the KBE tool, also the only other boot environments I've ever made are the regular Windows PE ones for imagex and such.
Would it be possible to have a live OS to pick from the PXE boot list with programs like VMWare View installed on them?
Answers (2)
You can use the KBE Manipulator (http://www.itninja.com/question/kbe-manipulator) to upload pretty much any bootable ISO or WIM as a boot environment on the K2000. You could then use the Boot Actions to set those machines to always boot to your chosen environment.
The trick is whether or not Live OS is capable of booting from the K2000. Many of the popular Linux LiveCDs are designed to specifically look for the Live OS in a compressed file on removeable media. This means that "out of the box" they won't boot from the K2000 because they wouldn't be able to find the LiveOS. It is possible to modify the initrd to look for the Live filesystem elsewhere, as seen in this blog post about modifying CloneZilla Live to boot from K2000: http://www.itninja.com/blog/view/k2000-kbe-manipulator-and-clonezilla
Of course, if you're building your own Live OS, then you can take that into consideration from the beginning.
The biggest problem I see is pxe loads everything virtually so your would a heap of ram to create the ram drive for a live OS. You need to use something like Citrix to do what you want.
