"Live" distribution PXE install server idea

I've had netbooks on the brain for the past few days now. I'm thinking about buying one for couch/living room use for the wife and I, since we use my failing Compaq laptop for web access and email. Late last night, it had me thinking about OS re-installs without physical media; considering netbooks seem to only support SD cards for removable media.

I'm not sure how practical this is, but I had an idea for reinstalling netbooks if you have another PC on your home network. I don't want to dedicate a host on my network to be a server for PXE installs (ex. Jumpstart or Kickstart), but what about a Live CD (or DVD) that has these services configured? If I needed to re-install my netbook, I'd just boot my desktop PC off the Live disk and then run the PXE install on my remote host. Does anyone know if I'm re-inventing the wheel, or if this idea is practical? I did a cursory search on Google, and didn't see any projects or distributions related to this.

On the netbook front, I'm torn if I should purchase one or not. I do own an iPhone, but that doesn't help my wife with Internet access around the house. She already has a recent iPod nano, so purchasing her a Touch would be a waste of money. I'm also seeing notebook prices dropping, and wonder if I'd just be better off buying one of those instead for a couple hundred dollars more. A co-worker of mine did mention that if I wasn't happy with a netbook, there would be plenty of interest in buying one used, and that the resale value on Craigslist or eBay would probably be about a $100 loss on my part. I'm looking at the Asus Eee and Acer Aspire One models, and I'm leaning towards this one. I would normally be interested in one using Linux since they seem to have SSD, but with the wife also being a user, I don't want to have to play sysadmin/helpdesk at home.

Solaris Jumpstart server interference

I've been working on trying to install Solaris 10 via DVD and "boot cdrom" on a host in the lab. I've been wondering why the install keeps assigning it an IP address and hostname without me supplying one. Even after running "sys-unconfig", I was never prompted to put in a new IP address or hostname.

The problem was our Jumpstart server. We had jumpstarted this host in the past, testing some automation installs, and the server still had an entry in the ethers file. Apparently when the server starts up, it tries to be slick and configure its interfaces for you when it boots. It looks like the Jumpstart server was picking up the requests and saw it had a matching MAC address in its configuration. The Jumpstart server then passed the hostname and IP address to the server I was trying to install. After we shut down the Jumpstart server, the sys-unconfig worked as expected. I wish the "discovery of network card settings" was not the default behavior.