[syslinux] PXElinux Modification Question

Cody Batt codyb at byu.edu
Tue Sep 17 06:14:08 PDT 2002


Hi,
We are new to PXElinux and we are using it in our test lab 
to do provisioning.  When the systems come up there is a 
PXElinux menu to boot local(default) or boot to the imaging 
environment (linux). It works great, but we have to visit 
each machine whenever we want to create or restore a disk 
image.  

Now we would like to be able to remotely force a system to 
re-image itself.  The stumbling block for us is how to get 
PXElinux to default to the image environment rather than a 
local boot. We don't want to have to change the 
configuration file that is downloaded from the tftp server 
every time we want to force a machine to re-image 
(including messing with symlinks to different config 
files.)  Is there a standard way to do this?

One idea we had was to write some data into a free sector in 
the first head of the first hard disk and modify PXElinux 
to look there for a certain tag that specifies which image 
should be booted.  How difficult would it be to make this 
modification to PXElinux? What problems can you see with 
this plan?  What resources are available for those of us 
that are new to PXElinux development?  Thanks for your time 
and insight.


-- 
Cody Batt
codyb at byu.edu



More information about the Syslinux mailing list