On 16/04/2021 13.21, Michal Suchánek wrote:
On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 07:28:26AM +0300, Andrei Borzenkov wrote:
On 15.04.2021 21:20, Larry Finger wrote:
On 4/15/21 4:36 AM, Michal Suchánek wrote:
On Tue, Apr 13, 2021 at 04:36:40PM -0700, L A Walsh wrote:
Unix used to provide a boot protocol for booting over the network. It predated linux, I'm pretty sure, and AFAIK, it worked with windows as well. You don't know very far here. Or can you share what protocol it is, specifically, and how do you create a netbooted installtion of Windows?
I have seen a TFTP boot of a Windows installer.
That's not surprising given that PXE is based on TFTP and it does not matter *what* you are booting over LAN via PXE, you end up loading it with TFTP. And PXE is the industry standard network boot protocol today.
It was slow, but it worked. I was not involved in setting it up, and I have no idea of the internals.
Yes, but loading Windows installer from TFTP does not mean Windows can boot from network. The installer is a Windows PE image that boots from ramdisk no matter where that ramdisk image is loaded from.
So while Microsoft provides a bootloader that can fetch the installer ramdisk from TFTP it still does not make it possible to boot Windows from network. The only way I know if is using hardware iSCSI which obviously works because Windows does not know about the networking.
I worked at a place where some ancient enterprise Windows was booted from the Network. Some high security system for the military. I was a user, not privileged to know how it was done. I think it was some sort of hybrid. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 15.2 x86_64 at Telcontar)