How to create custom debian distribution build for PXE boot?

Question

linux

Good afternoon everyone! There is a call center for about 1000 people in service. Scatter of equipment from atoms with 2 gigs to stumps (3700) with 8 GB. For normal operation, the operator only needs a browser and wine with a Windows program. Puppet has been raised for mass updating. There is an idea to create a lightweight live distribution (debian 8, openbox) and distribute it over the network, then many problems will disappear and only one image will need to be updated. The experience of people who have done similar things is interesting, pitfalls (for example, the load on the switches, the performance of nettops, etc.). What can be used to create a lightweight live distribution with the necessary packages?

Answer 1

Read about iPXE ipxe.org
This is a more powerful alternative to pxe. I have done so, pxe load ipxe. The user can then choose what to upload. Locally, or via iscsi, and at night the distribution kit for rendering is loaded automatically.

Answer 2

Read about LTSP - I think what you need.

Answer 3

I also did this, but did not finish the job.
I did this: I installed Virualbox, created a new vm machine with a vhd disk, installed all the necessary software, archived the disk in gz (so that it weighed less, the size decreased by almost 4 times), set up a dhcp server to load by pxe. But then I could not solve the problem, I postponed it for an indefinite time.
I used grub4dos, loaded the vhd image into RAM ( ramdisk or memdisk in syslinux). the image was with win xp occupied somewhere 2gb (in memory), ie. To work, you need at least 3 gigabytes of RAM on the workstation.
But there was a problem, the image was not pulled from the tftp server. I thought to do it on syslinux and download the image from the http server, but my hands have not yet reached. what a trouble with tftp did not understand.

Answer 4

Great article - Deploying a Linux distribution using SCCM 2012 , what you need.