ipxe configuration from network and automatic OS selection from PXE boot menu

[robinsmidsrod]

You might find some of the resources on http://networkboot.org/ of interest. If you don't find answers to your questions there, I'd love it if you submitted a feature request.

1. For starting up iPXE automatically, you most likely want to be using chainloading. You can find details on how to do that at http://ipxe.org/howto/chainloading for either Windows or Linux setup.

2. To automate what happens on a given machine during iPXE bootup, it supports a very extensive scripting language. See http://ipxe.org/scripting for details on how it works. If you want an extensive example of how you can set up a menu that enables a default boot action, but allows you to override, you might like this example I have written: https://gist.github.com/robinsmidsrod/2234639
You'll need to create one of those specific files in bootstrap/XXX.ipxe to override the default "exit" behavior, as mentioned in the gist.

3. Using the standard WDS mechanism for running Windows PE for installation requires WDS to have full control over your DHCP and TFTP server, and it is also slower than need be. If you install a web-server (you don't have to, it also works using TFTP) you can use wimboot to load your Windows PE installation without all the DHCP/TFTP funkiness of WDS. If you want to do a full installation of Windows (automated or not) then you should look up http://ipxe.org/howto/winpe.

Hope this has given you some clues on how to approach the challenge.