HTTP booting

Booting from HTTP with gPXE is as simple as replacing the DHCP filename field with an http:// URL. For example, if you currently have /etc/dhcpd.conf containing

  next-server my.tftp.server;
  filename "/pxe.0";

then you can just copy pxe.0 to your web server and edit /etc/dhcpd.conf to contain

  filename "http://my.web.server/pxe.0";

HTTP can handle much larger files than TFTP, and scale to much larger distances. You can easily download multi-megabyte files, such as a Linux kernel and a root filesystem, and you can download from servers that are not on your local area network. We have successfully tested booting across the Atlantic using HTTP!