begin Monday 01 March 2004 20:59, Donald Teed quote:

An existing Windows PXE Server provides a numbered menu which can be used to select a specific boot image. However it is not very robust.

I'm wondering if anyone has encountered something similar for Linux (DHCP + TFTP).

My idea is that a number of imaging types of tasks could be prepared with different initrd's from castomatic, and some initial boot loader could present the options in an easy to understand menu.

Something like this:

1. Sender for full hard disk
2. Sender for Windows partition
3. Sender for Linux partition
4. Receiver for full hard disk
5. Receiver for Windows partition
6. Receiver for Linux partition

udpcast is working very well in our smoke test with 20 machines. I really like the cast-o-matic PXE initrd generator. Pretty slick!

--Donald Teed

That's easy:

1. Using cast-o-matic (or a local makeImage) make an initrd that has everything preconfigured except disk partition, and send/receive mode.

2. In /etc/dhcpd.conf you set the following (in case you haven't this yet):

class "pxe" { match if substring(option vendor-class-identifier, 0, 9) = "PXEClient"; filename "udpcast/pxelinux.0"; # Uncomment }

3. Place your linux and initrd files, and syslinux's pxelinux.0 under /tftpboot/udpcast

4. Put the attached example into your into your /tftpboot/udpcast/pxelinux.cfg/default file The example assumes that you have Windows on /dev/hda1 and Linux on /dev/hda2. Adapt as appropriate (The idea is that you supply on the kernel command line those parameters that are _not_ set in the initrd . Actually it would be more elegant to supply _all_ parameters on the kernel command line, but unfortunately the kernel only seems to take the first 6 params into account...)

5. Put the attached message file into /tftpboot/udpcast/message

Alain