Network booting

Have you ever played with your toy cars and created a race track? Think of all of your toy cars as computers on a network, and the race track as the network itself.

Now, let's say your friends come over to play with their own toy cars, but instead of bringing their own tracks, they use the same track as you. This is like all the computers on a network using the same connection to talk to each other.

But what if there's a brand new car that hasn't been played with before? It doesn't know the race track yet. This is where network booting comes in.

Instead of having to manually program the car to know the race track, network booting allows the car to be programmed from a central location. So when the car is turned on, it can connect to the network and get all the information it needs to be able to drive around the track without any additional work needed.

This is similar to how a computer can be set up to boot from a network without needing an operating system installed on its hard drive. Instead, it can download the operating system and any necessary programs from the network, making it easy to set up and configure new computers on the network without having to manually install everything on each individual computer.