Building USB Booting FOS Image

[george1421]

@mwarner I really had to think about the answer to your task as to what is the right direction.

The 100% right answer is for when the iPXE guys are able to get the iPXE kernel to boot with the updated firmware that Apple has released. Then there will be no need for the USB drive. The MacPros will just PXE boot into the FOG iPXE menu. We are using the USB stick as only a stop-gap measure.

(Just me thinking out loud here) For FOG to backup a target computer the target computer’s OS must be stopped and the FOG linux (FOS) must be running on the target computer. So in “theory” if the MacPro was a uefi system, and you could create an at least 128MB partition formatted as FAT32, you could copy the contents of the usb drive to that partition. At this point all you would have to do is have the macpro boot from that partition. Once booted then FOG would take over.

It may be easier to just buy a handful of sandisk cruzer-fit install FOS on that and leave the fits plugged into the USB ports for when you need to image.

[sudburr]

Necro-bumping but I’m loving this solution; and as such I have feature requests.

I want two menus instead of the one. The first menu allows you to choose your FOG server from a list of options, clears the screen after your selection, then presents your existing menu as a second menu.

Next feature request, is a menu option to image directly without registering/rebooting.

Can these be done and how?

Orrrr, a prompt for user input prior to the existing menu that will be used to set myfogip .

[george1421]

@sudburr To do some of this you will need to become versed in grub menu design. Some can be done in grub. The deploy image function in grub is not so easy, that requires the integration of iPXE menus (which we avoided by creating a usb based tool). You can get pretty close but with static grub menus (as apposed to dynamic iPXE menus when you pxe boot).