As part of a broader project, I’ve been working on setting up the infrastructure to be able to power on new servers, have them boot over the network to download and run the complete Linux installation process, and then reboot into the freshly provisioned operating system with zero human interaction. This ability to fully reinstall the entire OS on any new (or replaced) hardware is a big win for servicability when you want to be able to freely add more servers, swap servers, wipe servers and reprovision them, or replace failed hard drives in a server and have it fully recover autonomously. I originally solved this problem a few years ago as part of the MicroMirror project, where I shipped each free software download mirror appliance with a recovery ROM on a USB flash drive plugged into the internal USB port on the motherboard of each system (which I still need to document), but this is a partially different problem than what I am trying to solve here, which is booting not off a load…
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