Question about PXE menu entry

[Paul-dH]

Hi!

Thanks for the cool project! This looks awesome :)

How whould we add this to a PXE menu (boot menu entry)? I've tried:

LABEL Thinclient
MENU Thinclient
MENU DEFAULT
KERNEL /images/thinclient/vmlinuz       
INITRD /images/thinclient/initrd.img boot=casper
APPEND boot=ramdisk ramroot=/images/thinclient/ramroot.tar.xz

I've build a PXE server with: ansible-role-pxe-server

Regards,
Paul

[oetiker]

I am using ipxe to manage booting .. this example might serve

https://github.com/mbirth/ipxe-config/blob/master/menu.example.ipxe

Also note we are using https://github.com/oposs/rr-boot-server to serve our ramroot boot images

[oetiker]

We are using this system internally and we would be glad to write more documentation and add missing bits to make this more useful for others ... if you have a budget, please be in touch!

[oetiker]

We use a dhcp config to get sent the 'ipxe.kpxe' file to the clients via tftp ... this is our config

subnet 10.123.102.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 {
    authoritative;
    option broadcast-address   10.123.102.255;
    option routers             10.123.102.1;
    option domain-name-servers 10.123.101.1;
    option ntp-servers         ntp.metas.ch;
    range                    10.123.102.10 10.123.102.250;
    option ipxe.no-pxedhcp 1;
    log (debug, binary-to-ascii (16, 8, ":", hardware));
    # if ipxe is asking ... tell it where to find its config
    if exists user-class and option user-class = "iPXE" {
      log (debug, "Detected iPXE Loader");
      filename "http://boot-server.example.com:3383/ipxe.cfg";
    }
    # we only want some special devices to get ipxe for now ...
    elsif binary-to-ascii (16, 8, ":", hardware) = "1:fc:aa:14:da:4:d0"  # client 1
        or  binary-to-ascii (16, 8, ":", hardware) = "1:fc:aa:14:da:7:3b"  # client 2
        or  binary-to-ascii (16, 8, ":", hardware) = "1:54:b2:3:8b:98:6b"  # client 3
    {
      filename "ipxe.kpxe";
    }
  }

[Paul-dH]

Hi @oetiker, thanks for the additional info!! Nice :)

I'm looking at replacing pxelinux with a cleaner setup with ipxe, I'll let you know if I got the setup running. The whole kernel and initrd arguments and setup is a bit new to me.