We have a chronic shortage of install media at FCS Workshops, so this is a project to mitigate the situation.

What it does

You set up a computer to boot from its network interface, plug in a network cable on the server's subnet, and boot into (currently) a Debian net-install or (coming soon) an Ubuntu Live session.

Ingredients

Clients

Any computer with the following:

Wired network interface supporting PXE (check BIOS)
Enough RAM to support kernel + RAMdisk (currently >1 GiB, will be more with Ubuntu)
Architecture supported by install image (currently i386)

Server

Hardware

Requirements:

At least one wired network interface
Enough storage to hold OS, servers, and install images (currently fits in 8GiB)

OS

Debian Wheezy

/etc/network/interfaces

#wired
allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet static
   address 192.168.0.1
   netmask 255.255.255.0
#radio
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
   wpa-ssid "FCSTEAMLAB"
   wpa-psk "whateveritis"

DHCP

isc-dhcp-server with the following configs:

/etc/dhcp/dhcpd.conf

# lines retained from default preceded by a comment (like this one)

ddns-update-style none; 

# option definitions common to all supported networks...
option domain-name "installment.local";
option domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8, 4.4.2.1;

default-lease-time 600;
max-lease-time 7200;

allow booting;

subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
    range 192.168.0.3 192.168.0.127;
    option broadcast-address 192.168.0.255;
    option routers 192.168.0.1;
    filename "pxelinux.0";
}

group {
    next-server 192.168.0.1;
    host tftpclient {
        filename "pxelinux.0";
    }
}

/etc/default/isc-dhcp-server

INTERFACES="eth0"

Install Server