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pseydtonne  ·  3561 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Looking to try a new Linux distro. Suggestions?

Gentoo takes care of a good few parts more than Linux From Scratch, which is the ultimate in learning and I should've mentioned it earlier. One piece that it provides is a compiled set of preboot execution environment tools.

The short explanation for PXE: it's a server listening for mewling, new bootups on the network. You can only have one PXE server per subnet. The usual configurations involve a PXE server listening for servers that just received their IP addresses from the DHCP server (usually your router in a home network) and running from LAN boot. PXE chills them mofos out and hands them to the TFTP server to download installer files.

My day job involves tech support for a server automation product. One thing the product does is provisioning, and it uses a set of PXE files from Gentoo to install on bare servers.