Topics created by mashina

@mashina You may have to make appropriate customizations but here are the basic steps:
https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images

@george1421

The problem was the IGMP Snooping as you suspected. Thank you for your help.

@TaTa

Thank you for your reply. I didn’t try your solution but after IGMP Snooping was configured on the VLAN, the multicasting worked immediately.

I left all the Fog multicasting settings as default.

@mashina hd isn’t a “true” kernel argument, and as such isn’t built as an environment variable at load up. As the OS loads, the getHardDisk function will get called and make its best guess to what drive to use.

If you want the specific disk of a host to be /dev/nvme1n1, then you should set it on the host under kernel device (or if it’s always global, set fdrive=/dev/nvme1n1 on the extra args instead of hd=/dev/nvme1n1)

PS: I changed BOOT EXIT TYPE and EFI BOOT EXIT TYPE and the rEFInd menu appeared and the Windows was booted.

Just curious to know if that fixed the situation or renaming the files which I mentioned before.

@mashina said in Providing installation media via pxe booting for UEFI systems.:

Interestingly, the problem doesn’t occur when Ubuntu is already present, and then Windows is deployed. Anyway, that is not a big problem at this moment.

But in this case the uefi firmware has already registered ubuntu as a bootable OS. So it just goes, oh hello I see you again on disk1. But if the entry doesn’t exist then it needs to be fixed up. You might be able to test this on a working system, go into the uefi firmware and delete the entry for ubuntu on the second disk, only leaving windows in the uefi boot manager. Upon reboot does it need to fix itself up again?

Just be aware that FOG doesn’t touch the uefi firmware or boot manager. BUT you can do that with in a FOG post install script and using the linux uefi manager (not the actual name) app. You can add remove uefi boot manager entries at your need.

Your suggestion works well for putting Linux on Disk1, but if the user needs to reinstall Windows, it’ll also go to /dev/nvme1n1, messing everything up

True it will mess everything up. But also I took your inital post as you will load windows once and then could potentially reload ubuntu or the OS on the second drive multiple times. If you “had to” you could write a FOG preinstall script to ask what drive do you want to send the image too, but that gets a bit messy, but its possible.

@mashina Ok now for the hacky path.

You can view the menu program behind the fog ipxe menu by pointing your browser to http://<fog_server_ip>/fog/service/ipxe/boot.php in the following example I’m going to use 192.168.50.23 as the fog server’s IP address.

You will see that the text behind the fog server’s ipxe menu is akin to a computer program.

You will see the “Deploy Image” (old name is Quick Image or qi) menu where it calls the boot.php program once again but adds in the parameter qihost=1

So now if we call that url again with the new parameters http://192.168.50.23/fog/service/ipxe/boot.php?qihost=1&username=fog&password=yourpass note you will need to enter a valid user ID and Password for your fog server to get past this menu. So in this case there are 3 parameters that need to be passed (qihost, username, password).

At this next screen it will list out all of the images you have defined in fog with its image id.

Each section will look something similar to this

set imageID 1 params param mac0 ${net0/mac} param arch ${arch} param imageID ${imageID} param qihost 1 param username ${username} param password ${password} param sysuuid ${uuid} isset ${net1/mac} && param mac1 ${net1/mac} || goto bootme isset ${net2/mac} && param mac2 ${net2/mac} || goto bootme

Now we add the imagid to the parameters list and call the boot.php program once again.

http://192.168.50.23/fog/service/ipxe/boot.php?qihost=1&username=fog&password=yourpass&menuAccess=1&imageID=1

That will produce this menu structure similar to what you are creating in your custom ipxe menu which is bootable via iPXE.

#!ipxe set fog-ip 192.168.50.23 set fog-webroot fog set boot-url http://${fog-ip}/${fog-webroot} set storage-ip 192.168.50.23 kernel bzImage loglevel=7 initrd=init_32.xz root=/dev/ram0 rw ramdisk_size=275000 web=http://192.168.50.23/fog/ consoleblank=0 rootfstype=ext4 nvme_core.default_ps_max_latency_us=0 mac= ftp=192.168.50.23 storage=192.168.50.23:/images/ storageip=192.168.50.23 osid=9 irqpoll chkdsk=0 img=Dell3630Base imgType=n imgPartitionType=all imgid=1 imgFormat=5 capone=1 type=down imgfetch init.xz boot

So this ipxe menu then will instruct the client to boot into imaging download mode.

Now to rewrite this into fog ipxe menu params block format

set imageID 1 params param mac0 ${net0/mac} param arch ${arch} param imageID ${imageID} param qihost 1 param username fog param password yourpass param sysuuid ${uuid} isset ${net1/mac} && param mac1 ${net1/mac} || goto bootme isset ${net2/mac} && param mac2 ${net2/mac} || goto bootme

Now you can create multiple fog ipxe menus just use a different image ID for the image you want to deploy. You can see what these image IDs are from the FOG web UI when you look at the images in list form.