PXE menu customization fewer options and fewer questions

[fritoss007]

I’ve browsed thru many old guides and wikis on how to customize the PXE menu but nothing very up-to-date seems available. I would like to remove as many options and questions as possible to streamline the registry of new computers. In fact I would only enable “Full host registration and image” option on the PXE menu and get rid of some question during that registration process by skiping them or autofill some of the answer. Any up-to-date guides available somewhere ? Thanks

[Sebastian Roth]

@fritoss007 As far as I know this question needs to be split into two separate ones. Not saying that you need to open a new topic but I mean one can be solved easily through the web UI while the other one needs manual modification of the FOG init file(s).

So first let’s look at the iPXE menu options. Go to FOG Configuration -> iPXE Menu Item Settings to find all the predefined menu options. So if you wanna get rid of “Client System Information (Compatibility)” for example you pop up fog.sysinfo section, set Menu Show with to “Do not list on menu” and click Save changes.

For customizing the registration questions you’ll need to edit the scripts build into the boot init file. Find information on how to modify the inits in our wiki. Be aware that if you follow those instructions to the point (extract and edit the current init.xz file in-place) no machine will be able to PXE boot till you have finished working on these. So I’d suggest you copy the init, edit it, copy back and test.

For playing with the registration questions you want to edit the file bin/fog.man.reg within the extracted/mounted init container.

[george1421]

@fritoss007 I can give you a hackers approach at doing what you want with the registration process. FOG calls fog.man.reg to invoke the registration process. You can find the source of this program here: https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/blob/master/Buildroot/board/FOG/FOS/rootfs_overlay/bin/fog.man.reg

If you understand bash shell programming you can make modifications to this program to alter it registration. I will give you a hint to use notepad++ to edit this file because windows notepad add extra windows junk into the file that will cause error messages during execution.

So now you have this file how can you inject it into the FOS Linux booting process?

1. You can do the recommended method to unpack and repack the inits as Sebastian outlined.
2. Take a bit of the hacker approach and use a FOG pre-startup script (i.e. post init script) to copy the fog.man.reg from the FOG server to the FOS Linux disk as FOS Linux boots. If you look at this tutorial: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/14278/creating-custom-hostname-default-for-fog-man-reg in the section called fog.patch.customhostname you can see how to “patch” FOS Linux as it boots.