Pxe Anything is a project by PerryLorier. This page was created to keep notes for things I discovered along the way that I thought might be useful to the general public (and important for me to remember).

The idea with PxeAnything is to have a server somewhere out on the Internet that speaks tftp and http, and lets any machine on the Internet to boot off it. It should provide a handful of netinst images for various distros, as well as a FreeDOS image. The freedos image should be nice enough to let you select what you want to do (flash your bios? install a linux distro?) and figure out how to boot that from within freedos. This should be a public service to anyone who wants to use it. No more fiddling around finding CDrom drives, or making bootable USB keysticks.

One flaw with this plan is that you do need some way to tell the machine to use this tftp server, so you will probably need to configure the local DHCP server to hand out a second stage pointing at the remote PXE server.

Anyway notes:

Net booting ISO generator

http://rom-o-matic.net/

Very useful for kvm/qemu that doesn't have a PXE server bios to test with! Note, kvm/qemu do now have PXE roms.

Crynwr packet drivers

http://www.crynwr.com/

Still around! Includes e100 drivers.

TCP/IP stuff for freedos

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/net/

Includes wget(1)!

LoadLin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loadlin

Lets you boot linux (+initrd) from freedos. Should be enough to let netbooting work.

MemDisk?

http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK

Part of SYSLINUX?, lets you PXE a FreeDOS? image. Looks like it might be easiest to PXE PXELinux, have a menu in that to select what you want, from there either grab an netinst image, or memdisk with freedos on it.

HX Extender

http://www.japheth.de/HX.html

This lets you run many MS Windows console apps inside DOS. Neat.

CategoryNetworking