[syslinux] PXE Linux boot to F12 automatically

[Chadley Wilson]

I hear what you all say, but also remember we have our reasons for doing things the way we do, and to top of a previous comments, I head a PC manufacturing plant in South Africa, and we have loaded well over 500 000 machines with Windows, Linux Unix you name it. So I believe that I am very well qualified to make the remarks I do.

I thank you all for your feedback.

But I believe that I run a fairly complex system and maybe if I had given more info about it, you would see where my query originates from, and possibly someone could point me to a possible solution.


Basically guys, I run two PXE servers, one is an in-house development which automatically loads the computers OS, this one automatically boots in the network option. This happens in our final stage of manufacturing. Where the Computers are plugged in batches of 50 at a time, when the last machine has booted up via PXE the server auto installs the correct OS. Be it windows, Linux Unix etc...

In the earlier stages of manufacturing I have another PXE server (WDS on 2008). This machine does not automatically boot. Again we have a series of in-house tools which run from this server, and we can also manually load any OS if we need to and even create a customize image for a client, pipe it to the OS server and load it. Because we brand our Bios, and we setup these recovery partitions that you see now days we have this multi-stage manufacturing process. When the system reaches it's customizing stage, there are also several checks which take place, now the PC builder in the previous stage has to setup the network as the first boot device, this get's changed at the very end in our Quality Control stage.

Many things happen in the customize stage, and the computers are not required to boot from network unless the user instructs it to. Working with WDS it was working very well.
The problem we face now is that SUSE, has the HW sid thing going like Microsoft and we are unable to cast images. I even had the chaps from Novell SA out and they have failed to give us a solution. So we need to setup a new element in our system. Which is the option to load Linux in the customize stage that I am working on. So I did the mods to WDS but it looks like I would have to change the process so the boot sequence is set at the customize station, this is not just a simple task of telling the people. There is a mountain of paper work to go through including board level approval. And we will probably have the ISO9001/14000... auditor out to verify. Not a route I want to take any time.


So I will change my question,

Bearing in mind that we have loaded an OS for test purposes at the build stage, and it will be the same OS that we will reload at the end. But we run some pretty good tests on the system and we don't want to release the image as a final image after we have loaded all the test software and verification tools. But we do need the PXE to pause if it does not get a key press it must skip PXE or abort and carry on to load the installed OS of that unit.

I see there is PXE abort function, when I tried it does not abort but rather hangs the units.

Does anyone have sample config files I can use for guidance to experiment?

Thanks




-----Original Message-----
From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com] On Behalf Of Claus Andersen
Sent: 22 October 2008 12:55 AM
To: For discussion of Syslinux and tftp-hpa
Subject: Re: [syslinux] PXE Linux boot to F12 automatically

On Tue, 21 Oct 2008, Ferenc Wagner wrote:

> Chadley Wilson <chadley at pinteq.co.za> writes:
>
>> The one problem I face is that you should press F12 to boot from
>> network, if you don't - the system must continue to boot from the
>> next boot device.  This is not what happens to me with PXELinux
>> 3.72, I don't press F12 and the system still boots from network.
>
> I'm confused.  Surely you know that the priority of boot devices is
> determined by the BIOS.  Enter the BIOS setup and configure it to your
> liking.  PXELinux is only started if the computer is already booting
> from the network, so it has absolutely nothing to do about this...

F12 is supported by many (but not all BIOSes) as an out of order execution
of the PXE network book even though it is not part of the default boot
order. I've have come cross a couple of BIOSes which rather expected F8
and other again which where "only" able to display a menu of boot options.

My guess would be that Chadley has PXE boot as the default boot setting
and the F12 he is thinking about is the default "startrom.com" delivered
by WDS.

I see three options:

1) Set the BIOS boot order #1 to harddisk and the use whatever means
needed to do a PXE boot but only when needed. What is needed depends
on your BIOS. This gives the smoothest end-user experience and is what I
would prefer.

2) Set the first menu option/default menu option in pxelinux.cfg/default
to "localboot" and set a timeout for the menu. This could show a menu with
different options where the first one would be localboot. This will be the
easiest for the on-site supporters but might be confusing for the
end-users.

3) Set the DEFAULT option to localboot. Again easy for the end-user but a
"little" more work for the on-site supporters.

Kind Regards,
Claus

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