maybe not 25 years ago... but it was common in the early '00s. This is not new tech. I participated in a project to do this with FreeBSD and nfs, I think around '03 or so. It was a smallish cluster (under 100 nodes) built to handle a simple Freebsd Apache Mysql PHP stack for a growing realestate ASP. Even then, it was not a new thing; there was plenty of documentation from other folks doing it.

I mean, it didn't go as smoothly as pxe booting does today; we ended up needing to reflash all our network cards to make it work, something I have not had to do in the last 5 years.

The NCD X terminals I used to work on did this (they actually ran a BSD Unix kernel under the hood, I believe). Also was popular for some Sun diskless workstations -- although the protocol was bootp instead of pxe.

> although the protocol was bootp instead of pxe

Well, they used bootp followed by tftp, and so did most other UNIX workstations of that time period. DHCP is effectively a superset of bootp -- it uses the same UDP port. PXE is DHCP+tftp along with some specification of tftp paths, where the image is loaded in RAM, etc.

Really the overall netboot mechanism is nearly identical as it was 25 years ago, just some protocol tweaks and a new acronym.

>Doing this kind of thing is pretty new for servers. Even massive HPC clusters tend to boot from persistent disk.

Not really, no. Servers all over the IT world have been using PXE and tftpboot for decades - in fact it was a very common method of booting a server even in the 80's. I know of quite a few Rail/Transportation companies whose track-side computers are booted over the network using these techniques, and there are about 250,000 of those things just in Europe alone ..

What's new is that another generation are discovering this technique.