The nimbus boot process can be divided broadly into 3 stages. The first stage varies by the type of system while stages two and three are the same for all Nimbus clusters. The stages will be reviewed in order.

  * **Stage 1**
    Stage 1 begins with power on to the node. In systems with a standard BIOS, stage 1 is a      [[http://www.intel.com/labs/manage/wfm/wfmspecs.html/|PXE]] boot. For [[http://www.linuxbios.org/|LinuxBIOS]]     systems, [[http://www.etherboot.org/|Etherboot]] is used instead.
         
  - DHCP

PXE boot begins by performing DHCP. The master runs a DHCP server daemon whichwill
provide a temporary IP address on the boot net and instructions to load the pxelinux.0 binary
boot loader. Please see IETF RFC 2131  for details.