PXE booting on existing network

[Thoreau]

At my work we have an existing Wintel network with a couple thousand PC's on it.

Currently I believe DHCP is being spit out by a win2k server running the standard dhcp service.

In our office we have a standalone switch that is seperate from the network. On that mini-network I set up TFTPD32 and Ghostcast to be able to pxe boot a PC, launch Ghost, and connect and stream an image onto that PC.

My question is wether or not it is possible to integrate that type of function into the existing network using the Win2k DHCP service. I'm sure we would still need a seperate tftp server that would send out the boot image to the requesting PC but can the DHCP server in Win2k actually feed the necessary information to PCs so that they can in turn connect to the tftp server and launch my boot image?

The less that has to change the better, since this is a rather large and corporate-esque environment, but the more information I can feed to our network folks the more chance we have of making this happen.

It would just be nice to be able to re-image a PC in-place instead of having to drag it back to the office every time.

Any thoughts/input would be very very much appreciated!

 

[Cooky]

On your existing mini-network, does your Ghost server or another host provide DHCP service??
You need to set it up as DHCP Proxy so that all DHCP requests will be forwarded to your Win2k DHCP server.
A pdf document that comes w/ Ghost should have instruction on how to set it up.

 

[Thoreau]

tftpd32 handles dhcp, but unfortunately doesn't have any options really, and definitely nothing relating to proxying the requests

in the end, the only way corporate will allow a change like this is for their existing dhcp server to continue being the only dhcp server on the production network.

I should be able to run the tftp service on the network from one of the servers we have online currently, so feeding the boot image to PCs isn't a problem, it's just getting the existing dhcp server to spit out whatever is needed to tell clients where that tftp server is and what to get from it.

 

[Thoreau]

I may have just lucked into a friggin newbies guide to exactly what I'm looking for...

http://pxes.sourceforge.net/howtos/ms_only_environment/

That doc looks to have everything we need. I'll run it by corporate, perhaps test it on the dev network and post back, but it definitely seems to be spot on for what we're looking for.

 

[RebateMonger]

Best Practice is to keep your software-installation activities on an isolated network, apart from other networks. If somebody has malware on the office network, you can end up with malware on every new OS you install.

 

[nweaver]

as a disclaimer, I don't know anything about ghost (I think that the ghostcast is a horrible solution) BUT I have done some work with PXE using the Altiris setup. Most of this depends on your network setup. You have to add one option to the DHCP server, telling it there is a PXE server out there. When you machine sends a DHCP request, there are 2 replies, one with all the standard DHCP stuff from your dhcp server, and one with boot file info from the PXE server.

The problem comes in when you have multiple subnets talking to one DHCP server (using something like IPHelper on your router). It will only forward the IP info, so you MUST have a PXE server in each local broadcast domain/subnet. Altiris provides easy managment of multiple servers for this reason.

You can host the PXE/TFTP services ON the dhcp server (this is our solution) so that muiltiple subnets can use one DHCP/PXE server.

 

[Thoreau]

Oh jism... if we had Altiris I'd be a MUCH happier camper. As it stands we're lucky to have SMS (but nobody administering that system...) so getting them to dump the investment in SMS in favor of Altiris isn't really a possible sell. My last employer had an all gigE network (right to the desktop level, approx 5000 desktops at least) and Altiris running on it like a charm. Walk up to any PC, hit F12, choose your image, if Win2k check the SSID change box, next, done. God I miss that =(

As far as the multiple PXE servers thing, that could definitely put a kink in the plans. I'm a bit rusty on my networking but what you're saying makes sense and may just kill the project in its infancy. Even if we could get a PXE server in each store (pretty certain each is on a different subnet) we would probably have to duplicate the GhostCast server as well since from what i can tell clients do a broadcast of some type (never fired up ethereal so I can't be certain) when you give them a GhostCast session name and it goes out to try and connect to it.

Oh well, pwned by lack of Altiris yet again.

One question though, I was doing some poking around, and it looks like the DHCP server could simply point to any IP address for the boot file from the PXE server. Once the DHCP server has spit out an IP to the client PC, as well as the IP of the PXE server, shouldn't the client PC be able to just go shout at the PXE server for the boot file? Currently we have about a dozen stores on one campus and each one is fully capable of talking to IPs at any of the other stores. So in theory, the existing routing should get any client PC to the PXE server, at least the way I'm interpreting it.