Add menu entries for booting ISO or Kickstart images.

sniffski

I can’t seem to find proper documentation about how to add menu entries for booting ISO files like Live CD or any ISO Install Media.
Is it possible to do via the FOG Web interface or I need to do some work on the console directly?
Please help!

george1421

@sniffski This URL might give you a few ideas: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images

sniffski

@george1421 Thank you for your time to write.
I see these guides are mainly for Legacy (BIOS) boot. Do you think I can somehow convert them to work for UEFI?

sniffski

@george1421 Guides there seem to be outdated… at least for ubuntu. It looks like after Ubuntu 18, the concept for netboot changed a lot and it is more like booting live cd using something called “casper”…
I did played a bit with it, but couldn’t make it work.
Any fresh ideas are much appreciated… Also I’m more interested in UEFI boot.

Regards,

george1421

@sniffski said in Add menu entries for booting ISO or Kickstart images.:

Guides there seem to be outdated

I’m not sure how to respond without being a bit snarky response. These guides were intended to show what is possible to do with FOG even if its not a supported function of the FOG Project.

Ubuntu has decided to move away from the cli installer and totally messed up the remote booting with 20.04. I might think the Debian v11 boot method should be close to ubuntu method, but since Ubuntu and Centos are dead to me I have not tried to net boot any current release.

As for the bios/efi booting most of these tutorials support both, when the except of the ones that use memdisk that is a bios only utility where it will download the entire iso into memory and then boot from it. There are some caveats with this method

bios only
the iso image must be less than 2GB in size to fit into 32 bit RAM address space.

So when we copy the iso to a directory on the FOG server then boot the target os using FOG iPXE it really depends on the target kernel if it supports both bios and uefi.

george1421

If you reference this ubuntu discord thread you will see others have a similar quest. https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-22-04-pxe-uefi-netboot-desktop-installation/27841/6

On that page it references this site: https://www.molnar-peter.hu/en/ubuntu-jammy-netinstall-pxe.html

Which kind of indicates its possible to netboot into ubuntu

To integrate this with fog you will need to do the following.

Copy the file jammy-live-server-amd64.iso into /var/www/html directory
create the following directory and place your preseed files into it. /var/www/html/jammy

Make directory /tftpboot/jammy and place vmlinuz and initrd from the iso into that directory.

Then use this as your iPXE menu

Menu Item: os.ubuntu.Server.22.04
Description: Ubuntu Server 22.04
Parameters:
kernel tftp://${fog-ip}/jammy/vmlinuz
initrd tftp://${fog-ip}/jammy/initrd
imgargs vmlinuz initrd=initrd ip=dhcp cloud-config-url=/dev/null url=http://${fog-ip}/jammy-live-server-amd64.iso autoinstall ds=nocloud-net;s=http://${fog-ip}/jammy/
boot || goto MENU
Menu Show with: All Hosts

I have no idea if this will work or not. I just took the info from the above linked files and translated it into what the FOG server has and what iPXE needs to boot the live iso image.

sniffski

@george1421 With few modifications of your description, I’m getting one step closer. However I’m stuck after “Trying to download and mount… .iso” , i get “wget: short write: no space left on device”…
Any ideas how to move forward from here?

regards,

Sebastian Roth

@sniffski Maybe this post/topic is of any help to you as well: https://forums.fogproject.org/post/143080

Would be great if people help together to get this stuff documented somewhere. Would you be willing to help with that?

RipAU

iPXE itself is pretty powerful when it comes to menus and booting options, obviously your results may vary from distro to distro or application to application etc. etc.

This example is using the Advanced menu, with subcategories etc.
I haven’t had much need for this in a while due to my work changing the way the boot system here works breaking things out of my control, but this is a post from a few years back that should still work but you would need you to look up specific settings per distro based on what you are trying to do.

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7329/sub-menu-within-fog-advanced-menu

This guy has some impressive examples: https://gist.github.com/robinsmidsrod/2234639

Additional information DHCP Options:
https://gist.github.com/robinsmidsrod/4008017

Example for Sysrescue:
https://gist.github.com/robinsmidsrod/1c7bbd4a058f0e6892df

Results may vary. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯