iPXE discussion forum

Hello :-)

I'm a javascript developer who knows nodejs too and I never ventured into PXE or anything similar yet.

The only time I wish I'd get in touch with the topic is aprox. once a year, when I get a new laptop or I want to install everything from scratch on my current laptop for various reasons, because to install an operating system and set everything up the way I want, including:
OS installation guided by the usual wizard, deinstall some pre-installed programs, install other programs that i need, copy over configuration files, adapt some configuration manually, and finally copy over my data. This process usually takes me a weekend to tweak everything so that it suite me.

I'd love to automate the procedure completely.

After a long time of research I figured, that iPXE could help me to automate all of this.
I read a Thinkpad T61 doesnt support PXE Boot, but I also read it's not needed for iPXE.

MY QUESTIONS:

• What should I read?
• Are there some good text or video tutorials?
• Do I need a FOG Server?
• Can I write my own server? (I found nodejs packages that help with creating chcp/tftp/etc.. servers)
• What are the websites "netboot.xyz" and "networkboot.org" about?
• Do I need to buy and create a special USB Stick that I can stick into my Thinkpad T61 to be able to iPXE boot it? (and if so, what would be a good one to buy and where - link appreciated)
  

Well, you've got a lot of questions. Let me try to address at least some of them.

1. The information on networkboot.org is more generic and is supposed to help you understand a bit more about network booting in general.
2. There are some video tutorials linked from networkboot.org, but my own playlist on YouTube might help you: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL...PdsGU1npTJ
3. Only if you plan on using FOG. My personal preference for doing image-based installs/restores is Macrium Reflect (for Windows). There is a free version available.
4. You don't need a server-side scripting language for doing most of ipxe menu things (see http://ipxe.org/examples for links), but if you want to have some state changes that survive reboots then you might need to use it.
5. They are both websites made by iPXE community members. networkboot.org is maintained by myself.
6. You don't usually need a specific USB stick for this. You can do something called chainloading if your machine already has wired network support with PXE (which most have). See http://ipxe.org/howto/chainloading for details.

If you want to learn more, join us on IRC and hang out. Everything that happens is mentioned there first.