Background
I’ve been a big proponent of network based provisioning pretty much my entire career. My second job out of college involved imaging ~800 computers multiple times a week. When I was hired, my predecessors used floppy disks to load a small OS, matching NIC driver, and imaging client (remember Ghost?!). The bottom line was it was very time/labor intensive and a horrible process. Imaging a group of systems took about 30-60 min. Long story short we reduced that time to about 5 min after we leveraged a combination of PXE, wake-on-lan, UNDI drivers, vlans, and IGMP snooping. My second iteration of the solution took the total attended time to less than 30 seconds. Anyway, it’s amazing technology for provisioning, and I even got hired at Red Hat by giving a presentation on PXE. Needless to say, I’m a huge fan!
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