Topics created by alesser

@alesser Not really unfortunately.

The token you see on the screen is stored in the fogserver in a different mechanism. What you see is an encrypted string compared to what is actually stored in the FOG Server.

If you have the original “plain text” value, it should work (even if you don’t see the same key) as it’s still referencing the same “plain text” value.

@alesser said in PXE-Booting a Modern Ubuntu live CD via UEFI mode:

I simply want to boot a linux live CD in EFI mode when the option is selected, run a script, and then stop.

Reading between the lines here, I wonder if another approach would be better/faster/greener?

Let me tell you a bit how fog images computers. The iPXE menu in conjunction with the boot.php program send 2 files to the target computer with some kernel parameters that tell the target computer what to do. Those two files are bzImage (the kernel) and init.xz (virtual hard drive a.k.a initrd). Those two files make up the os known as FOS (Fog Operating System). FOG uses buildroot to construct the initrd as well as compiles bzImage.

So one might wonder, do you need a full commercial OS run your script or just a linux OS? Do you need a persistent disk storage or once the script runs can the virtual machine just disappear?

So the grey beard hacker in me wonders if you could take FOS Linux delivered by the FOG server to do your bidding? Unless you are doing something crazy (like vlans, wireless, packet filtering) FOG’s bzImage should do what you need. It supports both uefi and bios modes, as well as init.xz. FOG supplies both a 64 bit and 32 bit version of FOS Linux.

So how do you hack init.xz to not image your target computer? Simply unpack the inits https://wiki.fogproject.org/wiki/index.php/Modifying_the_Init_Image Once you unpack the inits then look in the /etc/init.d directory for S99fog and delete it. Repack the inits and then pxe boot the computer again. Now you have a command line linux OS to play with that boots in under 15 seconds and disappears when powered off. The entire OS fits into 512MB of RAM, so its very VM friendly. If you need persistence memory just map an NFS share and grab your persistent data from there.

You might want to look into the /etc/init.d/S99fog file a bit deeper since you want to run a script the S99fog to do your task. https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/blob/master/Buildroot/board/FOG/FOS/rootfs_overlay/etc/init.d/S99fog

Now what do you do if FOS Linux doesn’t contain the linux programs you need. Welp, then you need to turn to build root and build your own init.xz (initrd) file. No worries since the FOG Project also provides the buildroot config file and fs overlay you need in the github site. https://github.com/FOGProject/fos/tree/master/Buildroot