Is there a service out there that lets you boot all types of OSes?

I've been using WDS but so far I've not found a way for it to netboot Apple as well. It's all windows/wim files.

Would using DeployStuido be an ideal system? I maintain 100s of machines and they vary from Windows XP to 7 and all types of Apple OS 10.

EDIT: The servers I have are Mac OSX (I know horrible. I can always use Linux or another OS. Nothing major. I just need to be able to boot all types of OSes from one server)

4 Answers

No: It is not possible to PXE boot any arbitrary OS.

Let me explain why:

After the first stage of booting a PXE enabled hardware has loaded some code of the OS into the memory of the target computer, this code hasto 'know' that the boot process should continue over network and not fromsome local media. So every type of OS you need to be able to boot overthe network has to be modified to support booting over the network.

For many OSes this has already been done. But not for all of them.

I'm using PXELinux so I'm not sure if this will help. I was getting a headache setting all the flags etc to boot winpe from files. So I told it to forward the iso instead. I'm not familiar with macs. If there is something like a pe disk you could theoretically send the pe disk to the mac and theoretically have it establish either a nfs or smb share, then install over that.

My winpe section just sends the whole 300mb disc over.

I was under the impression that macs were bsd like, so it could possibly work like a linux pxe share. I got most of what I needed from this site ->http://www.serenux.com

Links

I used my router to redirect the pxe to my server. Not sure if any of this would help, it's just a start.

The UEFI in modern Macs does not support PXE as an older BIOS does. Macs netboot using BSDP (Boot Server Discovery Protocol), not PXE.

There are extensions to the isc-dhcpd (the package snoweagle mentioned) that support BSDP.

To take advantage of this and have only one boot server for your windows and macs you'd need to get away from WDS (my understanding is that it requires MSFT to manage DHCP service, I may be wrong), deploy an isc-dhcp server, and configure it to support both windows/linux clients via traditional PXE and macs requiring BSDP.

Here's some documentation on setting isc-dhcpd to repsond to BSDP requests:https://code.google.com/p/google-macops/wiki/UnderstandingBSDP

One apple user's experience (unfortunately the link with the real info is 404):http://lists.apple.com/archives/client-management/2006/Dec/msg00033.html

Here's a nice writeup of a setup that lets a user select windows/linux at boot time:http://blog.oberghmans.be/?p=77

I'm working on a similar multi-OS netboot environment currently with WDS and FAI (debian linux). The way I handle the issue is using an independent DHCP server (using the isc-dhcp-server package running on Debian) as a switcher between OS provisioning servers.

In the config you can point the pxe requests individually to different machines: