The set up of the client hardware matches that of the server, since in both cases I used the exact same hardware. Please refer to the section called “Setting up the hardware” for instructions.

You should have obtained the clients MAC address. Now, you need to obtain an IP address for your client's primary network interface. In my demonstration setup I made one up, but if your setup is part of an existing network you will have to consult your network administrator. In the section the section called “Configure DHCP” I described how to set up an entry for a client. You need to restart the dhcpd daemon so the changes will become in effect.

Now, we need to create a configuration file for PXELINUX. In many cases that will be a symbolic link to a default configuration. We already created a file suitable for our client (see the section called “Installing pxeboot configuration files”) and named it netboot. PXELinux uses a specific search algorithm, which was described in The PXELINUX configuration file search algorithm, you may want to reread it. To find out the name of the configuration file for our client, we need to convert its IP address into hexadecimal. My client had IP address 192.168.10.11. To convert that into hexadecimal, from within a shell type:

$ printf "%02X%02X%02X%02X\n" 192 168 10 11 
C0A80A0B
$ _

We can create a new file with the name C0A80A0B or we can create a symbolic link with that name to an existing configuration file. I did the latter and. Running ls in directory /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg results in:

total 4
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         1024 Jun 30 16:14 .
drwxr-xr-x    3 root     root         1024 Jun 24 15:28 ..
lrwxrwxrwx    1 root     root            7 Jun 30 16:14 C0A80A0B -> netboot
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           38 Jun 24 15:57 default
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root          170 Jun 24 16:56 netboot   

Now comes the fun part: boot your client, sit back and watch how it installs itself.

As soon as the kernel has been booted you may log in to the bootserver and remove the symbolic link we just created ^[11]. After the installation was completed the client will automatically reboot. Because you removed the symbolic link PXELINUX will not be able to find a file whose name corresponds to the client IP address and hence will load the defaultfile^[12]. The default file will instruct the client to boot from local disk.

If the client ever needs to be restored to a known state simply restore the symbolic link and reboot the client.