I will be helping out with my local Linux User Group‘s annual InstallFest.  One thing we are going to do to hopefully make the day go a bit smoother is to use a PXE server to hand out a few flavors of Linux to PCs that are able to boot from the network (most are now a days).  You can read up further on PXE here, but basically it is like booting from a CD only the files are all sent over the network.  This allows us to have multiple CD images and a menu to pick and choose which is wanted.  Very slick and also impressive to anyone who doesn’t know how simple the mechanics behind it are…

First thing to do is figure out what our needs will be for the PC.  The CPU, ram, and video card needs will be minimal since this will be a console server, so I am not counting these as anything to worry about.  The network interface card will be a 100mb/s model which should easily handle our load.  Hard drive space will be a consideration however.  Although we have not decided on what distributions to actually put on the list, I am leaving enough room for 3 different distributions (both 32 and 64 bit) each DVD sized.  So, working out the math roughly we get 30GB for the images (3 flavors * 5GB per DVD * 2 DVDs).  I have an old client PC which is a P4 3.0GHz, 512MB ram, some generic video card, and a 40GB hard drive.  I have a feeling I’ll probably end up downgrading the CPU, but for now that’s my winner!

Next thing to do is load up a vanilla server OS (my choice is Debian via netinst).  Not a single hiccup during the setup process (typical), so I’ll be skipping right over to installing and configuring the packages necessary for a PXE server.  I know we are going to need a TFTP server, DHCP server, NFS server, and possibly more.  I’ll be documenting each step in the process, so subscribe or check back for more details…