To install a new operating system on your computer, whether it be a Windows version or a Linux distribution, in most cases you start by starting your computer from a CDROM and answering the questions put on your screen by the installation program. Doing this for one computer is fine. Doing this for fifty computers gets really irritating, especially if you have to do it every week all over again.

A solution is in hand because most operating systems also provide a way to answer all these questions of the installation program automatically for you. Generally the questions are written down in a file, and for every installation you can just reuse this file. With Windows this is called an "answer file" while with for instance Red Hat Linux (or Fedora Linux) a "kickstart" file is used. The most common way to use such a file is putting the file on a floppy disk and inserting the floppy during the installation.

When we are installing 50 computers we only have to insert 50 floppy disks and 50 CDROMs. But one change in the answer file means we have to change 50 floppys. Worse, what if we have computers without floppy drives or even CDROM drives.

Well, modern computers also have a way to boot from the network using a special bootprotocol called PXE. If we setup a PXE server we can still boot our clients without using CDROMs and maybe even try to provide the answer files without using floppies. But how do we transfer all the setup files over the network - which transfer protocol or program is the fastest?

Every time I singled out a piece in the setup procedure which was inefficient or slowing things down and I tried to improve that piece. And every time the setup procedure got a little more complex. The amount of dirty hacks grew and got more difficult to explain to others.

BOOST is just a covername for the set of tools, documentation and standards being used. It is not a seperate program but more a distribution of existing tools glued togeher with my own hacks. But because it is not just a bunch of scripts but also includes documentation, it provides an insight to what is needed to install a lot of computers using just open source tools.