GRUB, ISO, and remote boot.

[Tom Buskey]

You can create a custom kickstart that pulls everything over via NFS, FTP
or HTTP maybe even iSCSI.

But you'd need some kind of initial boot to get to that point.  Either a
DVD/USB/PXE that loads the initial part then mounts the rest over the net &
does the install.

You might want to look at iPXE, coreboot and seabios.

I've also seen stuff on creating a DHCP/DNS proxy for gPXE boots when you
don't control the DHCP network in the OpenStack community.  Maybe it was
Foreman?

On Thu, Oct 23, 2014 at 7:13 PM, Ben Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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