In order to use PXE for installation, the machine to be installed must have PXE support. This can be either on the motherboard or on the network card. Most modern network cards have PXE support. To determine if a specific machine has PXE support, watch for messages during the boot process (before the operating system boots) and/or read the documentation for the network interface and motherboard.

PXE finds its IP address and configuration server either by using the PXE protocol or by using bootp. Most PXE implementations can use bootp, which means a standard DHCP server can be used since DHCP servers most often can serve bootp as well.

After finding its IP address using bootp, PXE reads a configuration file and kernel using TFTP (Trivial File Transfer Protocol). Therefore, a TFTP server is also needed, something that comes with most Linux distributions.

When the kernel has booted, the installation program will try to read its Kickstart file and all packages using HTTP, which means both the Kickstart file and all package files need to be available from a web server. The installation program will by default read the configuration and files from the host with the hostname tlinstallhost, so that name should be set in DNS, pointing to your install server, for easy installation. The other option is to edit the files images/pxeboot/pxelinux.cfg/default, and ks.cfg.

When the PXE client asks for its IP address via bootp, the answer must provide not only an IP address, but also a next-server value and a filename value. The next-server value is used to find where to download the file named in the filename value using TFTP. Except for this, the DHCP server must be configured to allow bootp, and to allow booting. The following is an example host-entry from a dhcpd.conf for the ISC dhcpd:

host sauron { 
    hardware ethernet  00:02:b3:46:ff:8d;
    fixed-address 10.47.3.163;
    next-server tlinstallhost;
    filename "pxelinux.0";
    allow bootp;
    allow booting;
} 

The setup must not neccesarily provide static addresses, dynamic addresses are OK as well. Detailed setup of the DHCP server is outside the scope of this document.

The TFTP server should be configured to serve the files under images/pxeboot/ on the TLCOS CD. If the CD contents are copied to the directory /var/www/html/TLCOS, the following could be written to the file /etc/xinetd.d/tftp:

# default: off
# description: The tftp server serves files using the trivial file transfer \
#	protocol.  The tftp protocol is often used to boot diskless \
#	workstations, download configuration files to network-aware printers, \
#	and to start the installation process for some operating systems.
service tftp
{
	socket_type		= dgram
	protocol		= udp
	wait			= yes
	user			= root
	server			= /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
	server_args		= -v -v -s /var/www/html/TLCOS/images/pxeboot
	disable			= no
	per_source		= 11
	cps			= 100 2
	flags			= IPv4
}

This assumes you are running xinetd instead of inetd. It also assumes the tftp-server package is installed. Reload xinetd to enable the tftp server.

Copy the contents of the TLCOS CD to a directory called TLCOS, below your web server root (for example, /var/www/html). Plese note that the TLCOS CD contains two files beginning with a dot: .discinfo and .treeinfo. Make sure these are copied as well.

Your server is now ready for booting PXE-enabled clients. Try booting a PXE-enabled client. If everything works, a menu should appear where you can press enter to boot from harddisk, or select installation. If the user doesn't do anything, the client is booted from the harddisk after 10 seconds of inactivity.