Anybody have experience doing it? It used to be you needed an expansion card (either PCI, or the older ISA for those that remember it) for LAN with a BOOT Rom on it, to do a network boot. Now it's becoming more standard, and even many built-in LAN ports allow for Network booting. See, I have a new job working as a warranty tech for a major computer manufacturer, and I'm just drooling over the efficiency. I want to implement so much of what we do at home. One thing is, they have full OS's on image files, hosted on a network server. So all you do is boot up the new system on a Network Boot, and it'll download an image of XP with a bunch of Pretest tools (confirm each piece of hardware and each port works). The beauty is, since it's not a traditional install, but transferring an image, the process goes from 1-2 hours to less than 5 minutes. It's amazingly awesome. It's hilarious to me that even though we only make Windows systems at my job, every one has had linux loaded on it for the image flashing process. Yes, we use linux to install Windows. So the Net server we use for images is called PXELinux, a derivative of Syslinux. But I'm guessing no one is THAT deep into linux around these parts? So I'd be interested to hear, would anyone have experience Netbooting at all, what did you use, and if not, would any techheads be interested in setting up a netboot server themselves if I get through (I.e. I could post my own experience, if anyone wants, but it WILL take some time)

Only experience I have had is what I experimented with myself. I have been presented the challenge of finding another imaging solution besides Ghost (since Norton Ghost is so expensive). At my job we use Norton Ghost to image stations but now that Vista is coming out the old image solution will no longer work. I have used Ubuntu linux, with DRBL server and Clonezilla Server loaded. It works pretty well on a private switch with no traffic. Only takes about 5-10 minutes to image a workstation. It also works with Windows Vista. Only problem I have run into is that some PXE network cards will not communicate with Linux. You have to update to the newest version of Linux to get new network card support. It sometimes becomes a headache trying to get all the functions to work but it seems worth it to be free. Hopefully I will be able to get it more streamlined as I used it more. Humble_Nerd