Wow, this is actually pretty cool.
As part of a side project I’ve been working on to set up a home server as a network host, I needed to get the server installation on the box but I tragically didn’t have a large enough USB drive lying around I could boot the install image from. I imagined that setting up a network boot would be a major PITA but as it turns out it’s actually really simple thanks to a tool called serva, which you can grab here. This app seems to have a lot of interesting features, and I only stumbled across it thanks to a quick and informative post by Ciprian Adrian Rusen, that I came across here.
His detailed post, summarized, in case I’m not making the simplicity of this clear:
- Get serva program (5 seconds?)
- Share a few folders on your network with (5 or 6 minutes, maybe? I save all these drivers so I didn’t have to track them down. YMMV)
- target computers network drivers
- extracted installation media
- Configure serva (at most, 2 minutes)
- tick a few checkboxes and point to the shared folders
- Boot your target computer with PXE enabled
- Profit/Win!
Now, while I was and still am super-excited about how simple the setup was, I’m going to consider building some kind of one-click app host for this kind of thing. Look for more on that in the future.