My hardware ignorance (NIC card question)

**tolstoy** · 04-09-2003, 02:12 PM

Are Wake-On-LAN cards and PXE compliant cards one in the same thing? Or are these two totally different technologies?

**rick420** · 04-09-2003, 02:35 PM

Well a PXE card would almost certainily (maybe even 100% certainily) be Wake-On LAN as well. PXE is for remote installing, kinda like a DHCP responder. I remember it from Win2k classes, you set up the server thats gonna do a unattendended install, and it sends out a request similar to DHCP to find all the computers on the LAN. The computers respond and begin installing. You like put a pre-configged install floppy in, boot up, the PXE card finds the install server, begins install......

Wake-ON is for remote turn on. Like if your box goes down, you can remote wake-on it and start it back up

**tolstoy** · 04-09-2003, 06:28 PM

[quote author=rick420 link=board=3;threadid=6795;start=0#63629 date=1049898909]
Well a PXE card would almost certainily (maybe even 100% certainily) be Wake-On LAN as well. PXE is for remote installing, kinda like a DHCP responder. I remember it from Win2k classes, you set up the server thats gonna do a unattendended install, and it sends out a request similar to DHCP to find all the computers on the LAN. The computers respond and begin installing. You like put a pre-configged install floppy in, boot up, the PXE card finds the install server, begins install......
[/quote]

That's pretty much what I'm planning-- a RIS server installation. (I know, I know Ghost Enterprise is much better, but it's also more costly).

My problem is that I asked my Dell rep if the boxes I wanted to order had PXE complaint nics and he said "Sure they are all Wake on LAN capable." I asked the question again, and got the same answer again. I didn't think PXE and Wake \-on-LAN were that same. I just wanted to check.