Is DRBL traffic dangerous to send over a network?

[Andross561]

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if DRBL traffic can cause problems if sent over my Colleges network. I am believe that it only images the machines that are booted with PXE (or the machines whos mac address I saved in macadr.txt). However, I just wanted to make sure there aren't minute details I don't know about that I should be concerned about.

Thanks in advance!

[atreyu]

I've never used DRBL, per se, but I've done a lot of PXE-booting to install servers. I can tell you that it could be disastrous, if anything is mis-configured. Imagine somebody reboots their machine and presses the F12 key to boot over PXE, just to see what it does. All of a sudden, their hard drive is getting re-imaged! I know you mentioned hard-wiring it to specific MAC addresses, but if you accidentally botch that or something...uh oh. If I were you, I'd take every precaution necessary to make sure that only the clients you know about are allowed to connect to the DRBL server (to include DHCP configuration).

You might run afoul of the college network admins too, if you a running "rogue" network services - you might want to check that out, too.