Hi, We are new to PXElinux and we are using it in our test lab to do provisioning. When the systems come up there is a PXElinux menu to boot local(default) or boot to the imaging environment (linux). It works great, but we have to visit each machine whenever we want to create or restore a disk image. Now we would like to be able to remotely force a system to re-image itself. The stumbling block for us is how to get PXElinux to default to the image environment rather than a local boot. We don't want to have to change the configuration file that is downloaded from the tftp server every time we want to force a machine to re-image (including messing with symlinks to different config files.) Is there a standard way to do this? One idea we had was to write some data into a free sector in the first head of the first hard disk and modify PXElinux to look there for a certain tag that specifies which image should be booted. How difficult would it be to make this modification to PXElinux? What problems can you see with this plan? What resources are available for those of us that are new to PXElinux development? Thanks for your time and insight. -- Cody Batt codyb at byu.edu
We've been toying with schemes to do similar things. Our current thinking is to use lilo, and have a boot option (probably using syslinux) installed on the local hard drive which will cause the system to reimage itself over the network. Then you can do this remotely with "lilo -R reimage ; reboot", assuming the machine is up and running. If the system won't boot, then you have to do a manual load. On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Cody Batt wrote:> Hi, > We are new to PXElinux and we are using it in our test lab > to do provisioning. When the systems come up there is a > PXElinux menu to boot local(default) or boot to the imaging > environment (linux). It works great, but we have to visit > each machine whenever we want to create or restore a disk > image. > > Now we would like to be able to remotely force a system to > re-image itself. The stumbling block for us is how to get > PXElinux to default to the image environment rather than a > local boot. We don't want to have to change the > configuration file that is downloaded from the tftp server > every time we want to force a machine to re-image > (including messing with symlinks to different config > files.) Is there a standard way to do this? > > One idea we had was to write some data into a free sector in > the first head of the first hard disk and modify PXElinux > to look there for a certain tag that specifies which image > should be booted. How difficult would it be to make this > modification to PXElinux? What problems can you see with > this plan? What resources are available for those of us > that are new to PXElinux development? Thanks for your time > and insight. > > -- > Cody Batt > codyb at byu.edu
Cody Batt wrote:> > Now we would like to be able to remotely force a system to > re-image itself. The stumbling block for us is how to get > PXElinux to default to the image environment rather than a > local boot. We don't want to have to change the > configuration file that is downloaded from the tftp server > every time we want to force a machine to re-image > (including messing with symlinks to different config > files.) Is there a standard way to do this? >Yes, the standard way is to maintain this state as a symlink on the TFTP server. -hpa