[Ltsp-discuss] PXE booting w/ multiple servers

[Childers, Matthew]

We are a school district who is in the process of testing LTSP.  So far we are impressed, but we have one issue that would really be beneficial if we could solve.  We currently use Altiris Deployment Solutions for imaging clients throughout the district.  Typically when a client in the field needs re-imaged, we will PXE boot that client and Image it via Altiris’ PXE Server.  Now that we have set up LTSP and are PXE booting w/ it, we have found that we have to exclude the mac address of each thin client in the Altiris PXE Server, so that it will actually boot from the Linux Server.  We could work around this and separate the thin clients on their own subnet, but one of the things we like is that if a computers hard-drive crashes, while waiting on a replacement, we could simply set it in the bios to PXE boot, and that machine would be a thin client until we could replace the hard drive.  But we also like the ability to image a machine via PXE.  So I guess we would like to have our cake and eat it too.  What I was thinking is if we could do something where the user was prompted during PXE boot whether to boot to linux, or boot to Altiris Image Deployment.  Have a 5 second timeout that would boot it to Linux Terminal Server if no action was taken.  Is there anything like this, or has anyone run into this situation?  If so, please share what you are doing, or have done.  Any ideas are appreciated.   Thanks in advance, Matt