Netbooting with ISC dhcpd and tftp

• OS installations on 600+ machines using traditional methods is time-consuming, expensive and error prone

• Machines are netbooted from a 'golden' image residing on the boot server

  • Machines are always up-to-date
  • Deployment of new software and upgrades only requires a reboot
  • Currently OFS have about 300 of their machines netbooted
  • Machine can be instantly switched between different OSes
  • High performance (one server can push 500Mbit to netboot client computers through a Gig ethernet interface)
  • Multiple OS support: MacOS 9, MacOS X, PPC Linux, i386 Linux