iPXE supports a moderately powerful scripting language. It’s actually possible to do some pretty cool things with it. For example, to prompt for the IP information on boot you would use the following script. Note that the ‘ifopen net0’ isn’t in the example script iPXE gives for this, and without it your connection won’t actually work.

#!ipxe
echo -n IP: && read net0/ip
echo -n Subnet mask: && read net0/netmask
echo -n Gateway: && read net0/gateway
	
ifopen net0

You can pull off some pretty basic menus with it too:

#!ipxe
echo -n 1) CentOS netinstall
echo -n 2) iPXE shell
echo -n Please select an option:

read option

goto option_{$option}

:option_1
# Install centos

:option_2
shell

Embedding these into a custom image is pretty easy, you would just do:

make EMBED="yourscript.ipxe"

This would make an image that started yourscript.ipxe immediately on boot, which coupled with the script to read the IP information means you no longer need a DHCP server to network boot.