How to present different boot menu for Legacy BIOS clients and UEFI clients

[yonatan]

Hello,

I am working on automating os deployment for a lab setup. There are multiple systems that need to be imaged based on the host OS needs (mostly a lab test env). Some OSes need to be presented for UEFI only clients (for example rhel9.x) and some OSes only for legacy BIOS clients (for example windows server 2016). I created multiple entries under “iPXE Menu Customization” but all entries created are shown to all clients that boot to FOG PXE. I have a separate DHCP server which points to fog pxe server as “next-server”. DHCP server has class entries to point filename “undionly.kkpxe” or “ipxe.efi” based on PXE client arch. But once those are loaded on the client, it looks like default.ipxe is chain loaded which points to the same PXE menu for all clients. Does anyone know how to customize the FOG boot menu to present separate entries for UEFI vs legacy bios clients?

Please let me know if anyone has any pointer or help for this.
Yonatan

[george1421]

@yonatan FOG doesn’t have the concept of displaying certain ipxe menus based on platform type. You can probably do this with a custom advanced menu but then you have to hand code the menu. iPXE (the bootloader that creates the FOG iPXE menu) can branch in the code based on arch or platform.

While this quote doesn’t speak to your issue, you can see how the iPXE menu item can branch based on the iPXE platform field.
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/15984/integrate-fog-with-wds-mdt/11?_=1702084351302

You could use that concept to create an advanced ipxe menu. One other tip I can give you is that you can view how the FOG iPXE menu is constructed by pointing your web browser at the following url http:<fog_server_ip>/fog/service/ipxe/boot.php?mac=00:00:00:00:00:00

[yonatan]

@george1421 Thank you for the response and the pointer to previous thread on examples of how to branch the iPXE menu with the platform option. With this info, I am thinking along the lines of customizing the default.ipxe to present different menu based on the platform field. I will explore this method and see how far I can take it on presenting separate menu for legacy vs UEFI clients.