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Being tired of installing Ubuntu using CDs (especially if you have a machine without a CD-ROM) I’ve built myself a PXE Install server.

That has been done on my existing server running Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS.

First you need a DHCP-Server in order to deploy the correct PXE settings.

apt-get install dhcp3-server

The /etc/dhcp3/dhcpd.conf has been set to

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
range 192.168.0.195 192.168.0.199;
filename “pxelinux.0″;
}

Since I’m running a DHCP Server on my IPCOP that would interfere with the “PXE-DHCP Server” the following options where added to the IPCOP-DHCP

next-server 192.168.0.227
filename “pxelinux.0″

Take care to set these options for GREEN only. Making these Global will not work.

Now restart both DHCP servers.

tftpd-hpa will be responsile for deploying the files, therefore

apt-get install tftpd-hpa

does the job. Now change /etc/default/tftpd-hpa to start up as a daemon. (For some reason starting it via inetutils-inetd didn’t work for me)

After copying the contents from the /install/netboot directory on the Ubuntu installation CD to /var/lib/tftpboot you should be able to install a machine via PXE Netboot.

However this will only work for 1 distribution and will also perform a Netinstall where all neccessary data will be downloaded from the internet.
How to extend this to more than 1 operating system will be discussed later.