We found a product called BXP that allows us to boot Windows W2K/XP using PXE. The technique used differs from how Linux remote boots. Instead of downloading an image it emulates a local physical disk drive over the wire by I/O redirection during BIOS & post-OS startup - then block-oriented SCSI driver continues drive emulation. Effect is it only loads what is needed on demand. This eliminates the huge download and RAM requirements if working with the whole image. Boot times on 100Mbs are comparable to disk based system 1:30sec - boot read burst requires 20-60Meg of data depending on drivers & services and O/S- even supports things like multicast fastboot of multiple machines simultaneously. We use a small application that modifies the PXE database and can boot Windows 2000/XP or Linux from network selectively.
We are in a unique situation - technical university where we need to often switch O/S and be able to rapidly reconfigure many 100's of PCs - network boot effectively provides this. Mode called "WriteProtected" allows a fully unrestricted desktop that reverts to original on next boot - this way we can always guarantee that the machine will boot on next power on.
Regards wireless - I too would like to see a wireless CardBus 802.11a PXE option. Most of the cost and inflexibilty in our systems is in the wiring. As many mentioned PXE support on CardBus or PCMCIA is non-existent. Vendor says they will have this support in future when wireless vendors build-in PXE support.
My understanding is that in a unreleased secure version they incorporate firmware that encrypts the protocol from the BIOS stage through O/S bootup. Then switch to IPSec mechanisms built into Windows O/S.
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We found a product called BXP that allows us to boot Windows W2K/XP using PXE. The technique used differs from how Linux remote boots. Instead of downloading an image it emulates a local physical disk drive over the wire by I/O redirection during BIOS & post-OS startup - then block-oriented SCSI driver continues drive emulation. Effect is it only loads what is needed on demand. This eliminates the huge download and RAM requirements if working with the whole image. Boot times on 100Mbs are comparable to disk based system 1:30sec - boot read burst requires 20-60Meg of data depending on drivers & services and O/S- even supports things like multicast fastboot of multiple machines simultaneously. We use a small application that modifies the PXE database and can boot Windows 2000/XP or Linux from network selectively. We are in a unique situation - technical university where we need to often switch O/S and be able to rapidly reconfigure many 100's of PCs - network boot effectively provides this. Mode called "WriteProtected" allows a fully unrestricted desktop that reverts to original on next boot - this way we can always guarantee that the machine will boot on next power on. Regards wireless - I too would like to see a wireless CardBus 802.11a PXE option. Most of the cost and inflexibilty in our systems is in the wiring. As many mentioned PXE support on CardBus or PCMCIA is non-existent. Vendor says they will have this support in future when wireless vendors build-in PXE support. My understanding is that in a unreleased secure version they incorporate firmware that encrypts the protocol from the BIOS stage through O/S bootup. Then switch to IPSec mechanisms built into Windows O/S.