How I can install the OS linux files on many pc with a linux server?

Question

Ok, so before starting I am a French high school student, so I may make mistakes. My tech/computer teacher this year created an association in which, volunteer students can hand over old high school computers under Linux in order to give them to primary schools that need them for free, in order to teach them some notions in computer science. The problem is that we have more than 100 computers for which we need to install linux, with only one slot per week available. In addition, we can only do maximum 3 computers per week if the "course" is not cancelled.

So we had the idea of using a powerful computer on the network that would serve as a linux server, and that would allow us through a system like the one currently present on the computers of the high school for the synchronization of files, automatically have the clients ask the server at boot time for the files, and the server sends them the Linux files so that we don’t have to type the damn installation of the distribution for each client. (Clients are windows xp computers that already point to an internal high school server for file synchronization).

We searched on the internet for a quick and simple implementation protocol that could allow computers to recover the files, but without success. These resources must be hidden in the depths of the Internet, or simply that our research does not use the right keywords.

So I have a number of questions that could help us move forward. The goal is to avoid having a solution prefers too easily, or, at least, to have some explanations necessary for the understanding of my comrades on what we will put in place and how.

• What is the name of the system described above ? (This could allow us to refine our research)
• How does it work (without necessarily going into details) ?
• In what environments (for example datacenter) can these technologies be used, and will you have examples ?
• Do you know a free software available under linux to achieve this without necessarily us even making 250 shell scripts because I remind him, but we are high school students, and in the organization, I am the only one with skills in this environment (with my teacher of course) ?

Thank you.

Answer 1

The capability you're looking for is called "os netboot provisioning", or something similar. That's what you should google for.

The most standard, supported and commonly used solution is called PXE (Preboot Execution Environment) which uses:

1. DHCP protocol to provide IP to the server and bootstrap location.
2. And tftp as a simple file server that the clients could pull files from (including the bootstrap).

You can add iPXE (Preboot eXecution Environment) as @Nabil suggested in his answer, which is a newer, more flexible and feature reach version, but it's also more complicated, and usually you'll need to use it on top of the regular PXE format, because most of the network cards only support PXE.

There are also some tools that sort of "wrap" PXE/iPXE and let you manage machines provisioning through some sort of API (either Web interface, Graphical interface or just command line tools) such as netboot.xyz, Cobbler and others, but it might be a bit overkill for you. Those are mostly used for bigger and more complex environment where they might ease the job, but if you're only going to reinstall 3 machines a week, PXE should be just fine.

I suggest you'll just google for "install [your Linux distro name] pxe", and you'll find a lot of tutorials for your specific distro. Good luck!

Answer 2

I think you are looking for iPXE which is using in most of university.

Here a link in French that can help you