Hi folks,
There is probably a canned solution for this problem, but after some searching I
can't find it.
I currently run some stations booted over the network using pretty standard
PXELINUX, boot kernel & initrd (squashed) images. The PXE-bootable images
are thin client Linux (PXES, but could be anything like LTSP, ThinStation etc).
However I will be installing some more at the end of DSL links, and don't
want to do every boot from the network. Rather, I'd like the network option
to remain for initial installation or in case the hard disk installation becomes
corrupted. So, the boot order is HD0 then PXE. If HD0 is not bootable, or the
user selects PXE booting manually, then I want the PXE boot to
're-flash' the hard disk with a bootable Linux image sourced from the
TFTP server. Pretty effective disaster recovery for me...
Ideally, the user would be presented with a pxegrub (or whatever) list of
devices to install to (e.g. first 4 IDE drives, first two USB sticks and first
SCSI device. Then it would fdisk, mbr and copy a TFTP'd image onto that
device. For first shot, just always installing to /dev/hda would be fine...
It seems to me to be a simple script that could run in a PXE-booted embedded
Linux image, but that seems like a lot of work (basically a custom distro) for
doing very little...
Does anyone have a good elegant solution to this?
Thanks
Simon.
simon AT violetlight DOT com
simon AT redding DOT name
