Automate iPXE Menu Selection

[londonfog]

Hi There,

I’m looking to automate PXE installs on headless servers in a datacenter. But I am not sure how I can automate selecting the image in the list - I am using ipxe menus and not a static captured image

Is there a way I can drop to a pxe shell via keystrokes to then chainload the server + proper image? Maybe I’m asking for too much…

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

[george1421]

@londonfog So if you are running headless how are you selecting the image to restore?

Are you using FOG as a backup tool instead of a one to many deployment (just trying to understand a use case)

[londonfog]

@george1421 I’m using fog to netboot and run an autoinstall ubuntu 20.04(there may be better tools for this, but FOG is what we use, so I was trying to leverage it). But I actually found out a way to use selenium to screen scrape and use a hotkey to select the ipxe menu item to launch and essentially everything relatively autonomously. Reason for this is so a tech can ran a python script to configure a new server for that location and not have to manually do really anything other than plug it in.

[george1421]

@londonfog Just wondering out loud but if that python script can hit the FOG API, and register that new host and then select image deploy when the target computer boots up for the first time and it pxe boots, it will boot right into imaging. So if you already have the image defined, then you would create one curl api call to register the new server’s name and mac address with fog, then a second curl api call to deploy your image.

ref: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/11184/api-powershell-create-host-and-deploy-task-script