fog iso booting

[Tom Elliott]

@badhonsoam What, exactly, version of FOG are you using? Latest means many different things especially in us Developer’s eyes.

[badhonsoam]

@sebastian-roth is ipxe can boot both windows and linux. i am using 1.4.4

[badhonsoam]

@tom-elliott using fog 1.4.4

[Tom Elliott]

@badhonsoam iPXE can boot Windows ISO or Linux ISO, but in the case of any ISO, your system booting the ISO must have at least the amount of RAM as the size of the ISO (plus extra).

In many cases, the ISO isn’t designed to be booted directly from ISO without it being on a CD Drive too in the case of Linux. There are many tutorials around that help with this.

Here’s a few links.

https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Include_any_ISO_in_the_FOG_Bootmenu
http://ipxe.org/appnote/ubuntu_live
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10582/configuring-fog-server-to-deploy-linux-mint-iso
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10188/add-microsoft-dart-to-fog-menu
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/9648/add-a-second-pxe-boot-option
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/4026/fog-advanced-menu-iso-booting
https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php?title=Knowledge_Base#FOG_PXE.2FiPXE_Menu

[vl1969]

I have just close my post for similar issue. however in my case I want to actually boot clients using FOG boot services for dban ISO
which WiKi says is possible. I could not make it work as described in WiKi but I use this
post to make it boot as if ISO was a real CD. that is what you want to do a install of OS, right?

this definitely works.
the basic steps (and please read the linked thread fully) are

#1. create a directory in “/var/www/html/” to hold the ISOs [NOTE] : the final location depends on your server OS. since I use Debian 9 I have the “/var/www/html/” check to make sure you have the base folder. as the linked post implies some setups will only have “/var/www/” as base folder so that is what you need to use.
I simply did “md /var/www/html/iso”

#2. place the ISO file(s) into the new folder you created in step #1.

#3. make sure that the new folder and all files in it is owned by fog user and fog group
“chown -R fog.fog <your folder name here>”

#4. using Fog WebUI, create new menu item using parameter “initrd http://${fog-ip}/<your folder name here>/<Your ISO file name here>.iso chain memdisk iso raw”

done. works well. for simple ISO booting.

PS>> one thing though, this is for booting directly from ISO.
there are several threads here and on WiKi dedicated to adding specific OS install options to FOG like Windows PE
or such.

[badhonsoam]

@vl1969 done like u say. getting this error.please see the attach

[badhonsoam]

@tom-elliott i provide 1 GB the 3 gb ram. my iso size is 800 mb

[george1421]

@badhonsoam I can see the error message you deleted, it says no space left on device for pxe booting. The means that the size of the iso is larger than available ram to store the entire iso in memory.

You have to go the route of only passing the centos kernel and the init file system via pxe and then have the target computer connect back to the FOG server using NFS to get the rest of the image. Network (PXE) booting from an ISO image only really works when the iso image is small.

[Quazz]

If you’re trying to boot a Linux distribution, I recommend mounting the ISO (or unpacking it) and booting it directly. Seems to work better in most cases.

Don’t even try to directly boot a Windows install ISO.

[badhonsoam]

@quazz then what will be the parameter for windows and linux in new ipxe entry.

[badhonsoam]

@george1421 i give more ram then iso. i provide 1 GB the 3 gb ram. my iso size is 800 mb.

[KnightRaven]

In my Fog Config, Advanced Menu settings I have these line items for calling windows install and Linux boot…

:Win7pex64
initrd http://${fog-ip}/opt/Win7/ISO/winpe_amd64.iso
#prompt
chain memdisk iso raw || goto MENU
boot

:mint18_64
kernel http://${fog-ip}/opt/mint/18.1-cinnamon-64bit/casper/vmlinuz
initrd http://${fog-ip}/opt/mint/18.1-cinnamon-64bit/casper/initrd.lz
imgargs vmlinuz root=/dev/nfs boot=casper netboot=nfs nfsroot=${fog-ip}/var/www/html/opt/mint/18.1-cinnamon-64bit/ locale=en_US.UTF-8 keyboard-configuration/layoutcode=us mirror/country=US
boot || goto failed
goto start

Obviously you will need to setup matching locations with proper rights. There are articles, threads, etc that can help. I think Tom already listed some.
getting rights and NFS all to cooperate was the trickiest part.

For Windows you MUST use the WinPE version. I tried to use a standard USB bootable and did not work. Had to be PE.

For linux I just used a version of mint. Had to use it extracted. As in not the iso and link to the boot files.

Now there were some changes to Apache(at least Fog’s implementation) as well that may affect the path(s) you can use. To be honest I haven’t tried this in awhile. You may have to tweak your paths to work or Apache settings.

Jason

[george1421]

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images

For centos that works

[george1421]

@knightraven If you don’t mind I’b going to borrow this for the tutorial I’m working on.

[KnightRaven]

@george1421
You’re are welcome to use anything of mine. In fact I think you helped get the windows boot working awhile back. I’ve borrowed and tweaked just a bit from sources here at Fog anyway myself.

I have to much going on right now to test what I posted but I know it has worked. My current location has a bare bones setup just for deploying an image. I haven’t had time to setup the advanced menu items(well the actual files anyway).

[Quazz]

You should also note that memdisk requires (quite a bit) more than the ISO size of RAM in order to function. You’ll notice most ISOs people are booting to be 500MB or more often less.

Think of it this way: it basically emulates the optical drive in memory, but after that it still needs to access it, read the files and load the ones it needs into memory (meaning they are there effectively twice), it generally doesn’t load every file to boot from ISO, but it is something to consider.

[badhonsoam]

@knightraven thx. how will get windows. it need ramdisk. i think. if i donot want to use winpxe.

[KnightRaven]

@badhonsoam
So this is the attempt from awhile back at getting Windows to boot:
fog pxe/iPxe boot win 7 wimboot CD/DVD missing issue
You must use WinPE to boot. You can download it here.
Or just google/search windows ADK.
Once you have that installed you can make the WinPE boot ISO.
Also once you have that, you can copy any normal Win install to a share and use its setup. The instructions(and what we found) should all be in the original link I posted.
I think @george1421 may have a better/cleaner tutorial somewhere. Or someone did at one time. But this should get you in the right directon.

[badhonsoam]

@george1421 did u boot windows OS? can it be done without winpe? can u
direct me?

[george1421]

@badhonsoam Within my company we don’t install windows by pxe booting or using an iso image. We use MDT to build our reference image so I’ve no need to boot into windows this way. I do have an old way using winpe that I have documented here: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7765/pxe-booting-into-ms-windows-7-setup

I’m looking into adding windows booting to my current tutorial I posted in this tread. I don’t know if its possible to do without winpe. So stay tuned. I’m currently working with a Dell Win10 OEM disk to see if I can boot into the OS. I’m still several hours (days) away from seeing if that will work. If it fails, the winpe way will work (maybe).