gPXE: Modern FOSS Network Booting

Google Tech Talks August 11, 2008 ABSTRACT The advent of high-speed wide-area networks, coupled with emerging open standards for attached storage, has enabled relocation of traditional workstation drives to remote datacenter servers and facilitated virtualization of the boot process. It is now possible to load operating systems from remote storage arrays using protocols such as HTTP, iSCSI and AoE, in addition to legacy protocols such as TFTP. In this tutorial we will perform in-depth demonstrations of network booting Linux and Windows servers and workstations from network-based storage using open source software and open protocols. Speaker: Marty Connor Marty Connor is Project Leader of the Etherboot Project (http://etherboot.org), a globally distributed team of developers and users of innovative network booting technology. He is the creator and maintainer of the rom-o-matic.net website which dynamically generates custom gPXE and Etherboot network boot images. Mr. Connor is also CEO of Entity Cyber, Inc., a technology consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he has advised clients on technology matters for over 20 years. Speaker: Michael Brown Michael Brown is the lead developer of the Etherboot Project (http://etherboot.org) and is responsible for its evolution into gPXE, the current state of the art in network booting. He owns an open-source consultancy business, Fen Systems Ltd., and spends most of his time working on improvements to gPXE for customers across the world. He lives in Cambridge, England, and occasionally wonders what it would be like to have more than 64 kilobytes to play with. Speaker: H. Peter Anvin H. Peter Anvin has been hacking Linux since 1992. He is the author and maintainer of the SYSLINUX suite of bootloaders, part of the Linux kernel x86 architecture maintainer team, and author or maintainer of a large number of Open Source projects, including the Netwide Assembler, klibc and tftp-hpa. He is the founder and president of the Linux Kernel Organization, operators of kernel.org, the Linux kernel website. He lives in San Jose, California, and works for rPath, Inc.