Creating a PXE Deployment server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

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If you currently don’t have any structured means of managing deployments of Standard Operating Environments (SOE’s) in your organization, I seriously urge you to read on as learning how to deploy images over a network connection will save you a huge amount of time.

This guide will walk you through setting up a PXE boot server for you to deploy any form of network bootable operating systems.

A bit of background on this topic as to new users this will or is already a very confusing topic.
For starters, there is no such software called a “pxe server”. A PXE implementation is simply a combination of DHCP and a normal TFTP Server. The reason it is called PXE is because this is an acronym for “Preboot Execution Environment”.

In a nutshell, what we need to is the following

1. Install a TFTP server
2. Create our boot environment within our TFTP server
3. Point our DHCP servers to our new TFTP server
4. Enjoy not ever having to use a CD/DVD or USB boot device ever again.

Lets get started.

Install a TFTP server.

If you are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, do the following

[root@deployment ~]# yum install -y tftp-server

Now we need to start the tftp-server service. Also make sure that the service will start on reboot.

To enable the service run the following

[root@deployment ~]# chkconfig tftp on
[root@deployment ~]# chkconfig xinetd on

Lets actually start the service. As tftp is a service that is based on xinetd, we need to make sure xinetd is running. If you start/restart, it will also subsequently start/restart tftp.

To start xinetd, run the following

[root@deployment ~]# service xinetd start
Starting xinetd:                                           [  OK  ]
[root@deployment ~]#

Lastly, we need to open our firewall to allow TFTP requests to come into our server.

[root@deployment ~]# iptables -I INPUT -p udp --dport 69 -j ACCEPT
[root@deployment ~]# service iptables save
iptables: Saving firewall rules to /etc/sysconfig/iptables:[  OK  ]
[root@deployment ~]#

Should you chose to use Windows as your deployment servers, you can set up a windows based TFTP server with some freely available open source software called TFTPD32 and TFTPD64.

You can download this from the below link. I recommend you use the service edition installer.
http://tftpd32.jounin.net/tftpd32_download.html

NOTE: Yes windows does have its own TFTP based solution, but what ever you do, please don’t use it. Its a terrible implementation. Its bloated, not very user friendly and a real pain in the backside.