Quick Registration --> Return to iPXE boot menu instead of reboot

[abos_systemax]

Howdy,

Is it possible for the Quick registration option to return to the iPXE boot menu instead of rebooting the system?

[Wayne Workman]

@abos_systemax Is the end goal to image the system from the boot menu? Is that why you don’t want reboot?

[abos_systemax]

@Wayne-Workman
Yes. I always want a device to be registered, but do not wish to reboot in between. This causes too much work for our engineers. (because they have to be (and stay) present at the device in case it reboots and press F12 as soon as it does this, else it will reboot to Windows (and that’s quite the fuss to shutdown since windows

[Wayne Workman]

@abos_systemax Then use full-registration. It asks you if you want to image at the end.

[abos_systemax]

@Wayne-Workman
but requires user input…

I need all the basic information from the device to be available as soon as the device is booted to PXE (well, after the said quick registration).

This way, the engineer only needs to boot the device to PXE once, the device will QuickReg itself and return to the IPXE menu, from this point the menu will just stay put until the engineer starts a multicast task selecting all the online hosts

However, since it is possible in the Full Registration, I’ll take a look in that process to see if I can create it / edit it into the Quick Registration

[Tom Elliott]

@Wayne-Workman It will ask to reimage at the end, but it will still rely on pxe boot to startup.

However @abos_systemax You’ll be doing exactly the same thing as what you’re describing.

PXE is it’s own world. Basically it’s at the BIOS level, not an OS environment. Once the system is released to a physical desktop for booting into an OS (iPXE is not an OS, nor is BIOS), the bios is not able to be directly loaded. You’d need to reboot to gain that level of access again. So no, exiting OS back to iPXE is not possible (same as it’s not possible to exit directly back to BIOS settings).

[adukes40]

Can say, we used to use the key combos to get into pxe, but it seems FOG has it so in order for someone do to anything “destructive” it requires a login. So even if kids or employees try to image the machine, or delete the host, they will be prompted. So we do not even use a starting key anymore. just set it to image and turn it on, walk away

[abos_systemax]

@Tom-Elliott Thanks for that reply.
I am only (really) interested in the Serial/MAC address combination of the devices that I boot, so I’ll develop a bootmenu.php that posts these values to my own database and waits for the user to create a multicast task then.

Is it possible to remove the auto reboot feature however? (replace it with a … press any key to continue), that way the engineer can still quick register, but doesnt need to be present (and thus can move on to start/register different machines)