I've been using CrucibleWDS for the past year to image machines in my environment. My dhcpd.conf file lists the PXE boot information for clients attached to the particular network I use for imaging.
For efficiency's sake I'd like to merge that network and our main LAN onto the same sets of hardware rather than having physically separate switches and copper ethernet runs for each. Our NICs (Intel Pro/1000 PT) are 802.1q aware, so I could trunk VLANs coming off the switch and give a single workstation connections to multiple networks using a single run of ethernet cable.
As far as I can tell however that will preclude me from being able to use PXE boot/Crucible to image my systems since the card won't be aware of the VLAN tags prior to boot. Can anyone tell me for sure if this is the case? Can you PXE boot a machine when the network the imaging server is on is one of many tagged VLANs on a 802.1q VLAN trunk?
Best Answer
For this to work you will need to set the VLAN tag in the NIC's BIOS, if there is any.
Another solution would be to run the imaging network untagged into the systems, making PXE boot possible if the card can't boot from a tagged network. Then configure the operating system driver to use a tag for the production network.