HowTo Guides

This section contains tutorials that will guide you through performing a variety of network booting tasks for the first time. You'll need to download and build gPXE before trying most of them.

There are three typical deployment scenarios for gPXE.

• If you are a new user of gPXE, the quickest way to get started is to try putting gPXE onto a removable medium, such as:
  • bootable floppy disk
  • bootable CD-ROM
  • bootable CD-ROM with file storage
  • bootable USB key

• If you are deploying gPXE to a USB key, you may be interested in following one of these guides:
  • Deploying to a USB device while keeping storage capabilities
  • Booting gPXE from a memory stick partition with SYSLINUX

• Network card manufacturers, OEMs, and seasoned users may be interested in:
  • burning a gPXE ROM into a network card
  • adding gPXE to the BIOS (useful for on-board NICs): Award, AMI

• Users with existing large PXE deployments may want to try:
  • chainloading gPXE from an existing PXE ROM.

• Users with existing IBM/Novell RPL deployments may want to try:
  • chainloading gPXE from IBM/Novell RPL.
• Users with DHCP deployments that can't be changed may want to try:
  • using a proxy dhcp server

gPXE can boot from a web server just as easily as from a TFTP server. Web servers typically scale better than TFTP servers, and don't suffer from the file size limitations and other problems that plague TFTP booting.

• HTTP boot

gPXE has a minimal scripting language. Any command that you can type at the gPXE command prompt can be included into a script file.

• Boot scripts

Boot from SAN is the process of booting from a remote disk, using a protocol such as iSCSI or AoE. It can be used to boot operating systems that do not generally support network booting, such as Windows Server 2003, Windows XP or Windows Vista.

• Boot from SAN
• Install direct to SAN

gPXE has basic support for a few types of 802.11 wireless cards, and can boot over wireless networks including those protected by WEP or WPA Personal encryption.

• Boot from 802.11 wireless

Windows PE is the installer for Vista and later versions of Windows. It can be started from the network using gPXE.

• Booting Windows PE
• Windows PE with Memdisk

There are several DHCP options that can be used to control advanced features of gPXE. Instructions are available for

• ISC dhcpd (as shipped with most Linux distributions)
• DNSMasq (as often used in Linux-based routers and other small devices)
• Microsoft DHCP Server (included with Microsoft's Windows Server Products)
• Mikrotik RouterOS DHCP Server (as shipped with Mikrotik RouterOS)

• debug Debug/Record gPXE messages over serial cable
• gdbstub Debugging with gdb