Red Flag asianux Server 3 Installation Guide: PXE installation method

This chapter is a high-level topic in the installation manual.

In general, we use U disk or CD-ROM to boot the installer. However, if you encounter a computer without an optical drive or USB device interface (or if you are using a non-standard USB device and optical drive), you can use the PXE installation method. In addition, PXE installation is an efficient way to work when a large number of computers need to install the system at the same time.

4.1 What is PXE

Strictly speaking, PXE is not an installation, but a way to boot. The prerequisite for PXE installation is that the computer to be installed contains a PXE-supported network card (NIC) that must have a PXE Client in the network card.

The PXE (Pre-Boot Execution Environnement) protocol enables the computer to boot over the network. The protocol is divided into client and server side, PXE client in the network card ROM, when the computer boot, the BIOS to the PXE client into memory execution, by the PXE client will be placed in the remote file through the http://www.aliyun.com/ zixun/aggregation/10919.html "> network downloads to run locally.

You need to set up a DHCP server and a TFTP server to run the PXE protocol. The DHCP server is used to assign an IP address to the PXE client (the host that will install the system), and because the PXE client is assigned an IP address, the appropriate PXE settings need to be added when configuring the DHCP server. In addition, the TFTP client is already present in the PXE client ROM. PXE client passes the TFTP protocol to the TFTP server to download the required files.

4.2 Perform PXE Installation

The devices required to perform a PXE installation are:

a DHCP server;

a TFTP server;

The host that will be installed needs a network card with PXE support;

A server that holds system installation files, such as NFS, HTTP, or FTP servers.

In general, the DHCP server and the TFTP server are on the same Linux server. Of course, you can also set this server to be the NFS/HTTP/FTP server that holds the installation files. The following is a diagram of the work process that is booted with PXE:

PXE Work Sketch

In the figure above, the PXE client is a computer that needs to install Red Flag asianux Server 3, and the TFTP server and the DHCP server run on another Linux server. pxelinux.0, configuration files, Vmlinuz, and initrd.img are all placed under the root directory/tftpboot of the TFTP server of the Linux server.