Here is a recipe to update the BIOS and propagate desired BIOS settings for a bunch of Intel server boards at once via PXE.

Warning: this assumes that all the boards are the same model, and have the same BIOS revision!
This also assumes you are using a Linux box to prepare your images and boot them.

Part I: Updating your BIOS
(this is more or less the same was what I provided before but a bit simplified.  I know you know all of this but I'm doing this partly so I can remember in the future).

Note, replace the ALIEF101.ROM file with a newer one if you like

1) unpack the attached file I've sent somewhere
2) put this line in mtools.conf
     drive x: file="/tmp/floppyimage"
3) run the 'autoexec_write_flash.bat'.  This will create and prepare the image file as /tmp/floppyimage
4) you can do an 'mdir x:' just to check out the contents.
5) copy /tmp/floppyimage to /tftpboot/floppy.img

6) modify your /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default file to have this in it:  (note, the c=80/h=2/s=36 are disk geometry specs.  Memdisk seems to autodetect this ok but this should help guarantee success.  BTW, if you try and cheat and, say use 160 cylinders DOS says no dice.)

DEFAULT DOS
PROMPT  1
TIMEOUT 5

LABEL   DOS
        KERNEL memdisk
        APPEND initrd=floppy.img c=80 h=2 s=36

7) Modify your /etc/dhcpd.conf to something like this (this is for a single machine, obviously you'll define a group)

host dcdesktop {
    hardware ethernet 00:0c:f1:ff:88:99;
    filename "pxelinux.0";
    next-server 192.168.1.1;
}

8) put the pxelinux.0 and memdisk binaries in /tftpboot.  

NOTE: though I have had no issues with these 1.44/2.88 floppy images, I *have* had trouble making hard drive images work with memdisk.  I had to roll back to memdisk 2.11 to make it work.  This would have enabled me to make one image for both the BIOS update and BIOS settings change, except that our utilities then stopped working.  That might have been a problem with FreeDOS, which was what I needed to make bootable HD images in an easy way.  ANYWAY, I can promise that this entire recipe works with syslinux-3.09

9) Make sure your tftp and dhcpd servers are running

10) Boot the servers!  Of course, you will need to tell them to boot via PXE.  I'm assuming you know how to do this remotely, because I don't!  

-- MattWalsh - 29 Dec 2006