GRUB, ISO, and remote boot.

[Ken D'Ambrosio]

Got it all working... almost.  I got the *boot* going just ducky, but 
then it turned out that there were menu options invoking kickstarter 
configurations, and that's when it went from a "wouldn't it be a nifty 
little timesaver if..." to "I'll have to document the snot out of this 
and write support scripts, and we'll likely be deprecating the hardware 
soonish, anyway."  So I'm dropping my effort.

That being said, this page was invaluable:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/nfs/nfsroot.txt

(Which, of course, is also on-disk for anyone with the kernel source.  
Somewhat sadly, I haven't done a kernel compile since btrfs got added to 
mainline.  All the features I want... are already in $DISTRO's kernel.  
No more kernel patches for UIDs > 2^16; no more patches for ACLs; no 
more patches for Asterix hardware drivers, etc.  I fondly remember 
driving home with my IBM Thinkpad 701C churning away on my 
pretty-much-daily kernel compile.)

Thanks for the help, all!

-Ken


On 2014-10-24 11:38, Matt Minuti wrote:
> Perhaps you could take a look at how netinstall images work, for
> debian for instance.
> 
> Or maybe you can take something out of this project:
> http://i.cs.hku.hk/~clwang/projects/slimwebpages/index.html [2]
> On Oct 24, 2014 9:34 AM, "Tom Buskey" <tom at buskey.name> wrote:
> 
>> 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
>>> 
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
>>> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
>>> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [1]
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
>> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
>> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/ [1]
> 
> 
> Links:
> ------
> [1] http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
> [2] http://i.cs.hku.hk/~clwang/projects/slimwebpages/index.html
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnhlug-discuss mailing list
> gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org
> http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/