GRUB, ISO, and remote boot.

[Ben Scott]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 6:58 PM, Ken D'Ambrosio <ken at jots.org> wrote:
> I know that GRUB can't, by itself, remote boot a live-boot ISO (it needs
> some help from the ISO, itself, which won't be the case, here).  But I
> also am almost sure I can
> 1) Mount the ISO on a remote system (and export it)

  This is just NFS, and (I presume) well understood.

> 2) pull specific files from the ISO, and use them to create a GRUB
> entry, which then

  Generally speaking, GRUB loads a kernel (and optionally, an initrd)
from image file(s) on disk, and then boots the kernel.  If you can
find the equivalent files somewhere in the ISO image, that should do
it, I would think.

> 3) boots up with the files pulled from the ISO, then accesses the remote
> system's exported ISO for the final boot process.

  This may be tricky.

  Generically, what you're doing is just a diskless workstation, an
idea several decades old in the nix world.  You just mount your root
filesystem over NFS and bam! -- you're off and running.

  However, the kernel provided by your live boot distribution may not
be set-up to support an NFS root.  If it doesn't, you'll likely have
to rebuild the kernel and/or initrd -- a non-trivial task, I expect.

> Trying to make this happen so that I can access remote hosts over a
> terminal server and do remote installs without having to have someone
> lug around a DVD and drive.

  Is USB flash drive an option?  It appears to be relatively easy to
copy an ISO image file onto a USB flash drive, and then make the
system boot from the USB flash drive, using the ISO image file as if
it were an optical disc.

-- Ben