Custom Boot Menu Group Filtering

[SKasai]

While the Boot Menu has some nice features for filtering, such as ‘All Hosts’, ‘Registered Hosts’, ‘Unregistered Hosts’ and the like… A ‘nice to have’ option would be to define additional ‘groups’ in this regard, as you may have a single fog host that has different batchs of machines that are registered that would use different boot options or not the boot options that is for ‘all hosts’, ‘registered hosts’ or ‘unregistered hosts’.

Example: Three labs have computers imaged by a single fog server… However, one lab requires using particular boot options that may change from time to time, the other labs might not need it. All three labs do use iPXE boot by default, but you only want the one lab to boot a different way with the use of iPXE boot.

[Wayne Workman]

What sort of particular boot options?

[SKasai]

In the case for my location… We have a lab of computers with 2 hard drives. Tom helped me with the iPXE boot menu under the current trunk version where we can specify which HD to boot into via grub.

Now thinking a head for other possibilities is that if another lab had to be setup the same way… But on a different schedule and may need to reboot under a different disk, it may be wise to differentiate the hosts into host groups so host group 1 can be specified with a set of menu options, host group 2 a different set.

At the moment, your options are only ‘Registered Hosts’, ‘Unregistered Hosts’ or ‘All Hosts’ with the other options of debug, advanced login and so forth, but for an unattended situation, you can’t really use the Advanced login as you don’t want users in a class lab to wonder how to get to where they want.

At the same time, in an instructional situation, a professor/instructor is expecting the computers to be ‘set to go’ for what they need. But at the same time, you can’t just “change the options” on the fly, as you have to cover the inadvertent scenario of the user rebooting the computer in the middle of the session by accident or on purpose and again, expecting them to choose the right boot option correctly.

This is more of an automation feature request, but also more of ‘nice to have’ versus a dead set, “got to have it.” type thing.

[Wayne Workman]

@SKasai So, to sum up what you want, basically…

You’d like to create other boot-menu groups that you can put registered hosts into - for which you can specify a default boot-menu selection ?

[SKasai]

@Wayne-Workman Correct.

Although to further elaborate…

You have Nodes A-F in Lab 1
You have Nodes G-L in Lab 2

Lab 1 - You want the default to be OS1 not OS2
Lab 2 - You want the default to be OS2 not OS1.

As it stands now, you can either do All Hosts or Registered hosts to list options. You can only set the default action over all.

The ‘like to have’ option is that you have the following…

• Specify a default based on a group of hosts (Registered, obviously)
• List only options necessary for specific group of hosts (Reduce confusion for different groups and simplify it further or restrict them down)

As it stands, you can do that to a degree with it being for registered hosts or unregistered or put it into advanced options, but then you would have to stand up multiple fog servers, one per lab.

[Wayne Workman]

@Developers Thoughts?

[Sodden]

+1 for this feature.

It would be very nice to have the option to set PXE menu items on Groups/Hosts.