Clients should automatically get their IP configuration parameters from the server, and this information should be located in a single file, used for all operating systems. Since almost every computer now has a hard-disk, clients should be able to take profit of it for reducing network load and as temporary storage space for the user. Users must have a login to be able to use any of the computers. The login should be the same for all operating system and should let the user access its unique home directory, common to all operating systems. That is, the PC should always look like if it were just installed.
Every computer has to be protected from virus attacks.
These constraints lead us to base our configuration on bootprom tools. Now that a standard for preboot execution environments as finally emerged, we ported the tools so that it now also works for any PXE-compliant bootprom. PXE boot roms, also called LanDesk Service Agent, are now distributed with almost all on-board network adapter. 3.1 Boot ROM and Hard-disk Bootproms exist for quite a long time, but until recently, they were solely used with diskless computers. It can be used, as we did, to cleanup the harddisk even before the operating system is loaded.