Universal remote boot and administration service

Booting operating systems over the network is a well established method to simplify system administration in medium to large computer environments. Remote booting Linux and using PXE based environments for large scale system deployments are widely adopted by many system administrators. While scaling very well in controlled subnets they can not easily cross sub-network boundaries or co-exist with each other. Additionally it would be desirable to offer a wider range of standard services not only in dedicated sub-networks but on the whole enterprise infrastructure. This paper discusses advanced network booting methods overcoming the restrictions of traditional PXE/DHCP/TFTP setups. It suggests a new approach combining existing well established boot services into a more flexible framework for remote booting a wide range of operating systems and maintenance tools. A centralized boot configuration web-service is the universal, multi-purpose entry point of the architecture offering configurable, flexible boot menus for directly managed and arbitrary computers of unregistered users.