Boot Porteus Kiosk iso from fog pxe menu

[Greg Plamondon]

We use Porteus Kiosk for our open enrollment process. instead of inserting a USB stick and installing the kiosk, I would like to install it from PXE.
If someone could help me with this it would be greatly appreciated.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Greg-Plamondon From what I read you can’t really install the kiosk client. Maybe I missed that part. But the FAQ states that you can customize the ISO file.

For PXE booting, have you tried memdisk iso booting yet? Thou this is legacy BIOS mode only:

initrd http://${fog-ip}/path/to/porteus.iso
chain memdisk iso raw
boot || goto MENU

Edit: Quickly extracted the ISO and found this in boot/pxelinux.cfg/default:

label pxe
kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.xz,pxelinux.cfg/initrdpxe.xz quiet http_server=

So you might be able to boot the extracted ISO. But on the other hand we don’t know too much about the kernel parameters for network booting this beside the litte information on their website: https://porteus-kiosk.org/pxe-server.html

Be aware that FOG is not using pxelinux anymore. We use iPXE now and while you can do many more things with iPXE it’s not always possible to translate things over from the old pxelinux.

[Greg Plamondon]

@sebastian-roth said in Boot Porteus Kiosk iso from fog pxe menu:

@Greg-Plamondon From what I read you can’t really install the kiosk client. Maybe I missed that part. But the FAQ states that you can customize the ISO file.

For PXE booting, have you tried memdisk iso booting yet? Thou this is legacy BIOS mode only:

initrd http://${fog-ip}/path/to/porteus.iso
chain memdisk iso raw
boot || goto MENU

Edit: Quickly extracted the ISO and found this in boot/pxelinux.cfg/default:

label pxe
kernel vmlinuz
append initrd=initrd.xz,pxelinux.cfg/initrdpxe.xz quiet http_server=

So you might be able to boot the extracted ISO. But on the other hand we don’t know too much about the kernel parameters for network booting this beside the litte information on their website: https://porteus-kiosk.org/pxe-server.html

Be aware that FOG is not using pxelinux anymore. We use iPXE now and while you can do many more things with iPXE it’s not always possible to translate things over from the old pxelinux.

Thanks @Sebastian-Roth for looking into this for me. I guess I will stick the the USB stick installs for now.

[george1421]

@greg-plamondon I’m looking at the iso image and I think we should be able to pxe boot it.

In the tftp root directory create a dir to hold your files.

mkdir -p /tftpboot/os/port

Copy from the iso image /boot/vmlinuz and /boot/initrd.xz to /tftpboot/os/port on the fog server.

Then you will want to create a new FOG iPXE menu similar to this

Menu Item: os.Porteus.Kiosk
Description: Porteus Kiosk 5.2.0
Parameters:
kernel tftp://${fog-ip}/os/port/vmlinuz
initrd tftp://${fog-ip}/os/port/initrd.xz
imgargs vmlinuz initrd=initrd.xz quiet first_run
boot || goto MENU
Menu Show with: All Hosts

Lets see what that does for you. We may have to tweak the image args because I see a parameter of http_server= in the syslinux config but its not in the grub config.

[gandzioreek]

@george1421 I tried, didn’t worked
I’ve seen on porteus forum some kind related topic:
https://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php?f=136&t=4076
I’m not PXE pro - any idea what to try next to make it work on FOG?

[Sebastian Roth]

@gandzioreek said:

I tried, didn’t worked

Please give us some more details on what you’ve tried and what happend - screenshots, error messages, … Otherwise we won’t be able to help you.

[george1421]

@gandzioreek said in Boot Porteus Kiosk iso from fog pxe menu:

I tried, didn’t worked

What didn’t work? What did you see?

While this thread is 2 years old, I just looked at the Porteus Kiosk iso image again, and it looks pretty much the same, so the menu settings I recommended previously should still work.

If it wasn’t for the details most things would work right out of the box.