[syslinux] PXElinux Modification Question

[Jim Wright]

We've been toying with schemes to do similar things.  Our current thinking
is to use lilo, and have a boot option (probably using syslinux) installed
on the local hard drive which will cause the system to reimage itself
over the network.  Then you can do this remotely with "lilo -R reimage ;
reboot", assuming the machine is up and running.  If the system won't
boot, then you have to do a manual load.


On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Cody Batt wrote:

> 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