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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I'm wondering if this is how we did a net install of a custom Distro back in a former job, but I don't recall. I just remember it being insanely easy to install the distro over the network, even on a VM.

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if it was a decade ago, PXE/tftp booting was pretty common (at MetaCarta we shipped dell 2650/6650 servers around then, and while field upgrades were from DVD, the QA lab had some "synthesize keystrokes through a KVM to select netbooting" and then a tftpserver that had the image you wanted to install in a MAC address specific filename, so the machine picked up the intended image. We got the idea from another boston-area startup (Vanu Inc) that put similar Dell servers in software-configurable cellphone towers, iirc)

As far as i know most places are still using iPXE and Tftp to load an image with some custom provisioning framework.

It worked really well but I haven’t worked on large scale DCs for a few years now so maybe some new stuff happened

PXE is still the king in large DCs. I can install ~250 servers in 15 minutes with a single xCAT node over traditional gigabit Ethernet. Give another 5 minutes for post-install provisioning and presto!

Your fleet is ready.

Nice! That was my experience as well. Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t falling too far out of date while I switched to some MLops roles for a while.

I don't know about servers and stuff but I'm using PXE to image a Surface Pro right now.

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