PXE Boot Server Configuration Using Linux

PXE is an acronym for Pre-Boot Execution Environment. To know what it does refer to the Pre-Boot Execution Environment page.

This document is a guide to configuration of a PXE boot server using Linux. It will be assumed that you already have an existing network with a Linux server that is responsible for assignment of DHCP addressing for your workstations. There are other guides to cover the configuration of a DHCP server.

You will need to install whatever packages are appropriate for your distribution to have PXE and TFTP.

Redhat / Trustix Guide

Manual Configuration

1. You need to obtain the RPM package for PXE and the RPM package for TFTP and install them on the server.

2. Activate TFTP in xinetd

• disable=yes to disable=no in /etc/xinetd.d/tftp
• service xinetd restart

3. Get OS ready in the tftpboot directory

4. Put the pxe boot linux kernel in the tftpboot directory

5. Configure /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg

6. Create default configuration /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default

Redhat Config Utility

Use the GUI Network Booting Tool on the Redhat server in XWindows.

If you do not have X installed, you can also use the console utility. The pxeos command line utility, which is part of the redhat-config-netboot package, can be used to configure the tftp server files.

pxeos -a -i "<description>" -p <NFS|HTTP|FTP> -D 0 -s client.example.com -L <net-location> <os-identifer>