Topics created by JRA

@george1421 …having made my decision though, I have seen the REFIND option available in the Boot Exit Settings. I’ll drop back in if that fixes the universe in the more “legacy” approach to all this.

EDIT - it did not I got a snowstorm of odd characters marching across the screen. Quite pretty but not successful. All fine though, have my route to making this work now.

@jra correct

@george1421

Best post I’ve found in troubleshooting this thanks much for that George! Tracked down another pesty, ancient server that “answered” and I will chop it momentarily.

I’ve had some excellent and patient help from you over the years thanks muchly for what you do mate. 🙂

@george1421 said in Securing FOG Boot Options?:

@jra Now that I’ve had my second cup of coffee this morning I can explain it a bit more.

What the advanced menu and advanced.php does is insert a menu you create when advanced.php is called. You have to hand code the advanced menu and insert the text into a field in FOG Configuration->FOG Settings PXE Advanced Menu field. That field is then inserted after the #ipxe you saw when you called advanced.php directly (like I had you do).

I don’t have the skills to do this, but it would be great if you could construct the advanced menu like you do the standard iPXE menus by just changing the Menu Show with field, to “Show on Advanced menu”. Then you could move standard menu item behind the advanced menu right from the gui. That sounds like a logical feature to have, but right now the FOG Project doesn’t have the developer time to add that feature.

Right right - ok I’m with you. Have the workaround though and for now even the non-splash menu is functional, in the sense that curious students here can’t amuse themselves doing goofy imaging.

I am appreciative of the help so thanks much there. 🙂

@george1421 Hi folks - so sorry huge influx of users back today, had to get on with other bits.

All three of your points correct though George yes. Although I’d add in on point 2 that it won’t WoL until power is unplugged for about 20 secs and also, following that, the PC is then booted to BIOS for a few seconds or paused at the polling for DHCP part of POST, and then shut down again. That will “prime it” for WoL and WoL will work thereafter until Windows is booted, then it won’t until you repeat the above “priming” process.

Thanks again everyone.

At this stage it’s not looking like a FOG problem strictly, so if you’re getting sick of it it’d be fair to say it’s outside you folks’ remit but I do appreciate the help muchly.

I don’t have an answer for you directly, but I can tell you how FOG work and how to reverse engineer a few things.

When a computer pxe boots it downloads the iPXE boot loader that has been customized by the FOG Developers. This will be ipxe.efi or undionly.kpxe (typically). Inside that boot loader the FOG Developers placed an initial iPXE script. That script calls a script on the FOG server called default.ipxe. That script then chains into FOG via the boot.php code. If you were to write your own code for the default.ipxe file (its just a text file) that displayed some background image and that had a count down timer. If no key is pressed then it would just boot from the hard drive. If a key was pressed then you could chain to the default FOG iPXE menu by calling the boot.php file directly.

So you will want to review the file /tftpboot/default.ipxe just know when you update fog it will overwrite this file so keep a backup if you alter it.

The next bit of hackery is seeing the text behind the FOG iPXE menu (I would use this as the framework for your own custom default.ipxe file). If you go to a web browser and key in http://<fog_server_ip>/fog/service/ipxe/boot.php?mac=00:00:00:00:00:00 that will display the text behind the FOG iPXE menu. In there its really a program that runs based on the iPXE programming language. You will see how menu entries work as well as the default menu selection as well as how the backgound image is called (hint you don’t have to use the fog background image for your custom boot menu).

Folks, thank you all so much for the advice here. And patience along with it too.

I got this working. Luckily enough, with the last image, the golden PC/VM did see internet, but all behaved perfectly.

Very minimal autounattend.xml manually edited to knock out a few options, FOG domain join worked super.

Again though very big thanks for nursing me through this one. It’s all working as it should and I’m extremely happy. 🙂

@Sebastian-Roth Thank you for all that.

I’m playing with it and got it nearly there by unt-ticking/re-ticking the AD join options in the individual host’s entry, then all my defaults populated nicely. Now have enough to go about tweaking with fog.log as you mention.

Thanks again!

@george1421

I used to see the issues with warm boots on older versions. That seems to not be the case in the latest version.