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On 03/07/13 22:52, Kevin Lucas wrote: > This is weird as I was just looking at this to speed up things here > and wondered how things worked with UEFI and PXE any dilemmas? or do > you just need to turn it off? Well, you can't really turn the UEFI "off" can you? I think you meant secureboot, which yes, you'll definitely have to turn off (even for doing win8/server2012 via WDS - you'd think it would work on that stack, but trust me, it doesn't). Apart from that, no problems at all. If anything, modern systems with UEFI tend to be equipped with much better network chipsets and boot ROMs, compared to the often flaky rubbish of yesteryear so if anything it's made it easier. You're still going to have to actually enable the network PXE boot in UEFI for 90% of the time though, it's usually disabled by default on consumer boxes and often doesn't show up in the "press F12 for boot menu" entries until it's been re-enabled. But yeah, if you get through a lot of machines, and not just installing, but routinely booting trashed systems with a variety of linux rescue tools, etc, then build yourself a boot/install server. It will save you so, so much time. If you also have to maintain and roll out custom images of linux for customer servers, and windows builds for various roles and so on, you absolutely *have* to get one. Technically, I actually have two install servers (both old 'real' servers, long since converted to VMs). The main one is an Ubuntu server 10.04 LTS for all the linux and BSD builds, and the other one is a Windows Deployment Server with all the countless confusing subsystems required for rolling/deploying windows builds. I'm not even going to try and pretend that compared with the completely straightforward linux server, the windows box isn't an absolute pig to work with... Here, linux is definitely your friend. If you are rolling lots and lots of boxes, you'll definitely want to look into Puppet, Chef or something similar as well. Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq