PXE NETWORK BOOT for Ghost 7.5

[Clivebuckwheat]

Hi

At work we have about 500 stations running windows xp pro , all of the
cards have PXE capabilities, how would I go about having PXE boot to
dos, load the correct packet driver for the nic card so it can connect
to the ghost multicast session.

Using boot diskettes are really cumbersome when you have 500 stations.

our ghosting server is a windows 2000 server running ghost 7.5
enterprise.

Making a bootable ghost partition is not feasible in our case because
we are using a progam called deep freeze which allows our students to
make any changes they want to the os but as soon as they reboot, it
comes back to the state it was, that is why we are using ghost boot
disks, because it can bybass deep freeze, i am trying to look into PXE
because it is pre os boot.

thanks rob
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Steve Marfisi]

Several options:
The Ghost Enterprise includes a boot wizard that will create a PXE
boot image that will, using the Symantec 'universal' packet driver
shim, create a boot image that is selectable from Microsoft RIS and
basically ignores the individuality of the NICs.

You can also use the 3Com Boot Services to create a network boot image
using PXE that can create boot images of the floppies that you may be
currently using. You can also use the 3Com Boot Services in place of
Microsoft RIS. Have a look at the quick start guide that came on the
Boot Services portion of your CDs.

Steve Marfisi
www.emboot.com

 

[Patrick J. LoPresti]

If you do not want to spend any money, you can do this with free
software.

You can boot an arbitrary floppy image over the network using
PXELINUX+memdisk (http://syslinux.zytor.com/). Do not let the name
fool you; PXELINUX is a general-purpose boot loader which has nothing
to do with Linux.

This is how my network boot disk works (see
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/).

You can put all of your network boot floppies on the network and
choose one to boot from the PXELINUX menu. Or, you can add the
"keeppxe" flag in the PXELINUX configuration file and use a universal
DOS network driver (do a Google search for "undis3c.dos"). You see,
since PXE already loads a network stack with a standardized interface,
a single DOS network driver can support ANY network card with PXE.
This is also what my network boot disk does, and it works great on a
wide variety of systems.

If you get stuck and need more details, write me personally. There
may be some subtlely with the driver, since I vaguely recall that
Ghost uses packet drivers instead of NDIS drivers... So you may need
to use the dis_pkt.dos "shim" driver.

To: (e-mail address removed)
Newsgroups: microsoft.public.win2000.networking,microsoft.public.win2000.setup_deployment
Subject: Re: PXE NETWORK BOOT for Ghost 7.5
References: <[email protected]>
From: "Patrick J. LoPresti" <[email protected]>
Message-ID: <s5gektouoa7.fsf@patl=users.sf.net>
--text follows this line--
If you do not want to spend any money, you can do this with free
software.

You can boot an arbitrary floppy image over the network using
PXELINUX+memdisk (http://syslinux.zytor.com/). Do not let the name
fool you; PXELINUX is a general-purpose boot loader which has nothing
to do with Linux.

This is how my network boot disk works (see
http://unattended.sourceforge.net/).

You can put all of your network boot floppies on the network and
choose one to boot from the PXELINUX menu. Or, you can add the
"keeppxe" flag in the PXELINUX configuration file and use a universal
DOS network driver (do a Google search for "undis3c.dos"). You see,
since PXE already loads a network stack with a standardized interface,
a single DOS network driver can support ANY network card with PXE.
This is also what my network boot disk does, and it works great on a
wide variety of systems.

There may be some subtlety, since the universal driver is an NDIS
driver and Ghost needs a packet driver (as I recall). You can use the
dis_pkt.dos "shim" driver to bridge this gap. Hey, sometimes it takes
some work to avoid spending money .

If you get stuck and need more details, feel free to write me
personally.

- Pat

 

[Steve Marfisi]

Patrick - in terms of 'free'...to clarify what I said:

'Clivebuckwheat' indicates that they are using Ghost Enterprise - all
of the software that I mentioned is included, for free and without
additional payment, on the product that they already use, and I
assume, is paid for. Not only that, it is integrated, somewhat, at
least in terms of the Client Boot Wizard.

Your mention of PXELINUX is certainly noteworthy - it is free, and
works well. We use it in our own lab for testing.

Ghost can use the undis3c.dos or the packet driver shim - depends on
how you need to connect to the network.

Steve Marfisi