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Automation with PXE Boot

Quick Setup

Article from ADMIN 24/2014

By Stuart Burns

We show how to save time and stress by automating your system installations with PXE boot.

Sys admins know the key to being productive is coming to grips with the automation setup offered by an operating system. In this article, I cover creating a basic automation setup for Linux hosts. The tools used include PXE boot, web services, and DHCP. At the end of this article, you should have a complete, fully automated PXE boot and Kickstart system to install and configure a fully customized CentOS server.

PXE (or Preboot eXecution Environment) started in the early 1990s as an improvement to a series of protocols used to bootstrap diskless clients. The idea was to provide a complete boot configuration over the network, so a diskless client, or a computer with no operating system installed, could download a complete configuration at boot time (Figure 1).

Figure 1: A working example of PXE boot.

Previous protocols, such as BOOTP, had similar goals; however, these tools were very error prone and brittle. The old tools also needed lots of customization, and different clients required different configurations. Intel addressed these issues in the late 1990s with its "Wired for Management" standard. Part of Intel's system was PXE. Other manufacturers later followed suit and adopted the PXE design.