CargoBay

It may not be the most thrilling thing, but PXE booting is a lifesaver for me. What is PXE? Well it's a abbreviation of Pre eXecution Enviroment, which is a technology developed by Intel and most computers manufactured in the last 5 years have support for this. It's an extension to be able to boot from a network drive without any need for local storage hardware(as floppy, hard drive, optical etc).

Why would you want something like that? Well for me it's a rather easy answer. I want quickly be able to either install a operating system or use tools to troubleshoot a computer, where one of these is the Knoppix Live CD distribution and the simplicity of not needing to find and burn a CD. Instead I just boot it directly from my internal network.

The reason this blog post is about PXE is that for the last 5-6 days I have been reading and experimenting with quite a few software packages and set-ups to extend my current PXE environment with the ability to run more tools and I have added even more Linux distribution installers and the FreeBSD installer(my favourite *BSD flavour). Currently I'm writing a rather lengthy tutorial on the matter and it will be posted under my current tutorials.