Syslinux - Mar 2003 - PXE Network installs

Peter-

I am working on developing a system to perform network boot and
automated system installs of many systems, and I would like to use PXE.

New systems would boot via PXE, then directed to special images that
partition, format and install the server.  Upon reboot, the system would
boot off of local disk.

Do you know of any resources, or of anyone that has begun to develop an
infrastructure like this?

-- 
Matt Pavlovich <mpav at algx.net>
Allegiance Telecom, Inc.

Matt Pavlovich wrote:
> Peter-
> 
> I am working on developing a system to perform network boot and
> automated system installs of many systems, and I would like to use PXE.
> 
> New systems would boot via PXE, then directed to special images that
> partition, format and install the server.  Upon reboot, the system would
> boot off of local disk.
> 
> Do you know of any resources, or of anyone that has begun to develop an
> infrastructure like this?
> 
I'm sure many people have.  Perhaps someone on this list can give some tips?

	-hpa

Matt Pavlovich wrote:
>Peter-
>
>I am working on developing a system to perform network boot and
>automated system installs of many systems, and I would like to use PXE.
>
>New systems would boot via PXE, then directed to special images that
>partition, format and install the server.  Upon reboot, the system would
>boot off of local disk.
>
>Do you know of any resources, or of anyone that has begun to develop an
>infrastructure like this?
>
>  
>
I am working on a project to do something very much like that.

I am using pxelinux, syslinux, and isolinux depending on the medium.

Basically it is a multi OS loader. 

Here is what it does:

At boot we download a "universal" client via pxe ( or from cd ).  This
is a small linux distro + perl + DBI. 
It looks into our database, determines the respective OS, 
customizations, etc
partitions the disk into a little root partition and copies the 
necessary binaries onto it.
Installs syslinux onto the hard drive and reboots.
Client boots and runs through its native install ( windows + 
unattend.txt, Redhat + kickstart, etc )

All data is pulled from the database so they are hands free installs.

The