If you are in the Windows world, you might know that there is an upcoming Service Pack for Windows 2003 Server, which has reached the RC2 stage quite recently. This Service Pack brings a lot of improvements in the area of security, management and scaleability.

However, there are a few other interesting new features that have been added : The ability to boot an ISO image from the network.

The interesting thing about all this is that you don't have to install a RIS server anymore, only a simple TFTP server is needed (even under linux ;)). The procedure is quite simple and can be found here. The interesting part of this procedure is the content of the winnt.sif file :

<FONT face=Tahoma color=#808080 size=2>[SetupData]
BootDevice = "<FONT color=#000000>ramdisk(0)"</FONT>
BootPath = "\i386\System32\"
OsLoadOptions = "/noguiboot /fastdetect /minint <FONT color=#000000>/rdexportascd /rdpath=<image>.iso</FONT>"</FONT>

I don't know where the guy got his informations from, but this solves a lot of my problems.

Now, we're going to be able to allow a multi network-boot, Win/NetBSD/Linux from any workstation on the network. All I have to do now is populate the iso image with the necessary software and we're good to go !

I know some people that are going to be happy :)