Boot-time, web-based system configuration?

It would be great if one could automatically set preferences for a system
at boot time. One approach would be to check all detected removable
media (i.e. flash or floppy) for a knoppix config file that defines hardware
options, hostname, swap space, etc.

However, many computers are connected to the internet via ethernet,
and could easily retrieve a small config file over the internet. Ideally,
this would be done via a common koppix server where users could
store config files, or at least a URL of where to get the actual
config file(s) to minimize server load. If done right, the common
server(s) shouldn't take much bandwidth compared to existing
downloads, forums, etc.

If this could be done, it would solve a lot of issues of requests
for things like using a USB flash for $HOME or swap. For people
willing to share info, a server could also track things like options
used for different hardware types, to get an idea of what hardware
needs help getting configured.

Of course, for maximum versaitility, and for non-ethernet systems,
scanning removable media for config files would be good as well.

That's quite easy to do. You can have a knoppix.sh script that downloads the neccessary configuration files from the Net (via wget). For example. you can edit knoppix.sh so that it grabs configs.tbz from a URL. (Even better: have changed config files uploaded to the server at shutdown... but that would require some coding...)