I have two boxes (i386 and amd64) in the lab that I use for testing of drivers I work on. Recently another Maxtor hard disk died on me, and I decided to get network booting working. I already have a file server from which I host my $HOME directories and do all backups from. It sounded like a win.

I’ve never done this before, so it took me a few hours to get the first host going, the second took 10 minutes plus the amount of time to build the kernel for it.

Below, I describe steps I took to get pxe-enabled hardware to boot a debian image, from a debian DHCP, TFTP and NFS servers.