Booting and administering a computer over a network remotely isn't that big of an art form, nor is it new. From ever since I was in elementary school and even before that, there have been systems that could power on, pull the software needed from another system and boot into a working system. While it's not new, the way I had to go about booting the workstation over the network from an installation image hosted on my MacBook *was* new to me. I intended to use the Preboot Execution Environmentor PXE to boot the work station over the network. PXE is best introduced in this wiki article from this wiki . The systems that I'll be setting up for PXE booting have the following specs: Workstation: - ASUS A7V8X-X - AMD Athlon 2500+ @ 2.1 GHz - 512 MB RAM - 60 GB HDD - ATI Radeon 7000 64 MB - 500 W PSU MacBook: - Intel Core2Duo T7200 @ 2 GHz - 1.5 GB RAM - 80 GB HDD - Intel GMA950 - 60 W PSU (battery is physically dead) The first thing I did was configure the workstation's bios to boot over the network. The option to actually enable PXE in the Boot Options menu tab was hidden in the I/O Chip Configuration menu under the Advanced menu tab. After toggling that setting and setting PXE first in boot priority, I then setup the MacBook to host the installation image for the workstation. This ended up being quite a challenge, as it seemed that not many people who did computer networking used Mac OS X as their OS of choice on their Mac systems. I needed to at the time, so after looking around for a time, I found this wonderful nugget of information. While it goes over the instructions for working with Debian, I took the info I needed and combined it with the archboot imageand the info I neededfrom the wiki article for installing Arch over the network. After all that, I had to download the appropriate filesfrom here to replace the ones in the /private/tftpboot/boot directory, as the ones that came in the original image kept causing a kernel panic.
