These are to bare metal, not VM’s. So VM images wouldn’t be of any use.

USB and integrated management are how we are doing it now, it’s not great. Like I said, we have a very wide mix of servers. Some are pre-production, old, maybe half broken but good enough if we can get an OS on it. Some are retail and new and they work great for booting an ISO from iLO. Many might not have licenses for the iLO, idrac, IMM, etc.

We are trying to find a better solution. Looking around online, tons of people want something exactly like what I’m looking for but it doesn’t seem to exist. Maybe it’s a technical limitation and it will never exist.

Maybe imaging is the closest we can get. But still, I can’t go “registering” every server. I need a more simple solution to Create an image and Deploy an image. At least on the boot menu, there is an option to Deploy an image. But the process for Creating an image is too complex for our setups.

I’ll take a look at this, thank you.

Different subject, why are post replies showing up above the posts previous to them but below the original post? This seems very odd. I’ve read through several posts here and it’s frustrating to start at the top, then the “next” entry is all the way at the bottom. Then scroll UP one entry, but if it’s a long enough entry you have to scroll down to read the entry, then UP through the entry you just read, through the next entry just to get to the top of the “next” entry. Then down through that entry, then up through it and the next and then down and up…

This seems needlessly complicated. Is there a setting to fix this?

No, we would be reinstalling these systems later with something else.

What I want is to boot an OS installer. RHEL, SLES, Ubuntu and a few Windows Server flavors. There’s a large diversity of servers and OS combinations, that could change frequently.

We aren’t looking for a way to manage multiple images of each OS on each server. All we want is to PXE boot a server, get a list of OS’s and start the install. The changes to a server between each OS install are significant enough that an image won’t work, most of the time. A fresh OS install, will work every time.

From what I’m learning; this seemingly simple task is complex at best and impossible the rest of the time.

I’ve got FOG 1.4.4 up and I’m trying to make it do something useful and there’s a lot of “host registration” stuff that’s not needed. There’s big scary “Host is NOT registered!” red text on the PXE Menu, how do I get rid of that? People are going to think something is wrong and when it’s really just an unused feature.

I have no interest in registering a system to a PXE server, yet I can’t seem to find the menu options that have to do with Registering and nuke them.

Well, it’s the installer though. Wouldn’t it want ALL modules?

edit: Why is my reply ABOVE yours? This is backwards.

edit2: No, this is worse. It’s below my original post but above the first reply. This is worse than backwards.

I’ve got FOG 1.4.4 installed and seems to be working fine. I’m trying to add a menu option for booting the Ubuntu 17.04 installer. ISO has been extracted, NFS is working and I can PXE boot a VM into the Ubuntu installer. The first thing it tells me is that it’s unable to find any kernel modules and that installation will likely fail.

Here’s my menu parameters:

kernel nfs://${fog-ip}/images/ubuntu17.04/install/vmlinuz || read void
initrd nfs://${fog-ip}/images/ubuntu17.04/install/initrd.gz || read void
imgargs vmlinuz root=/dev/nfs boot=live netboot=nfs nfsroot=${fog-ip}:/images/ubuntu17.04/install locale=en_US.UTF-8 keyboard-configuration/layoutcode=us mirror/country=US
boot || read void

I’ve tried it first via HTTP, hit this same situation. So I searched around for a couple days and everything seemed to be using NFS. So I got that setup and doesn’t appear to be giving any errors that I can see.

Here’s the error: https://i.imgur.com/trYz3Re.jpg