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I want to set up a network installation using PXE to install multiple OSes. I found this guide that does something similar:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PXEInstallMultiDistro

But what I'd like is to have 4 separate OS installations, on 4 different partitions. One option is to manually repeat the installation 4 times. I need to do this on 16 machines, so it would be great to be able to do this quickly and at once.

What I figured I could do is to manually install the partitions the way I want to and then save the image. I could then serve this image from the network, and run a form of dd to image the drive.

How can I use PXE to run a dd like command in this way? Do you think there are other ways of achieving this?

Possible approaches from comments

  1. Create a master image, and use dd from a PXE script
  2. Use a Type 1 Hypervisor to have several OS images that can be selected at boot
  3. Use a Union FS. Store the modifications each group makes in their own partition. Or students come with their USB sticks that hold the modifications
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    I'm setting up a lab for a course. I want to have separate partitions so that students don't mess up the computers for other groups. Sep 2, 2014 at 14:48
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    Why do you want multiple operating systems installed in this manner? It's not common to have multiple OSes installed across multiple partitions on the same system on server-class equipment. Is virtualization not an option here?
    – ewwhite
    Sep 2, 2014 at 14:48
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    you could basically pxe boot "normally", and autostart a shell script once you have booted which does copy the "master image" via dd/nc/ssh/whatever Sep 2, 2014 at 14:50
  • Yes, I agree that this is not a typical scenario. The issue is, the students should have low-level access into the hardware, which is why I'm reluctant to use virtualization. But I'm not all too familiar with different virtualization techniques. How do you think this could be achieved via virtualization? Can I have it such that a particular VM is selected at boot? Sep 2, 2014 at 14:51
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    When I was at college we all had our own disk drive. Each machine had a caddy that we put the disk into before booting the machine. At the end of the lesson the original disk was put back for the non-IT classes. The next year they used MS Virtual PC.
    – tombull89
    Sep 2, 2014 at 15:00

2 Answers 2

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if you want to install "disk images" via PXE you can take a look at FOG .

If you want to PXE install different Linux & Windows ISO distributions from a menu take a look at Serva (I'm related to Serva development)

In both cases you can use real or virtual targets.

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One idea is to use a base os+virtualization. Let's say your base os is RH Linux. You could install that via PXE and use grub as the boot loader. Part of your kickstart could be to also install VirtualBox and Vagrant in the kickstart %post. You would then copy VMs or VirtualBox "Boxes" down to the Linux filesystem. From there, the users would just cd into the directory for the target OS and then issue "vagrant up" to start the guest os.

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