A Novel Intelligent Network Booting System

Network booting is the process of booting a computer from a network rather than a local drive. In this paper, a novel intelligent network booting protocol is proposed. It extracts all the states of the clients from their booting requests to their normal operations, which is depicted with a finite state machine. Based on the protocol, an intelligent network booting system is implemented with distributed modules, where the maintenance of the network booting system is automated, such as the preparation of the virtual booting partition for the client, loading and passing the booting parameters, and so on. Experiments are carried out to prove the efficiency of the network booting system.