[syslinux] PXE Boot Menu with iSCSI and AOE!

[Tomaž Kavcic]

Dear developer,

I am working on a project for my graduate work (diploma), which includes iSCSI and AOE booting. I made some menus using pxelinux and things are working fine with linux, but I have a small problem with windows system which require direct iscsi or aoe access.
I have dhcpd.conf setup that it to each first dhcp request handles out pxelinux.0, then I can chooose from that menu which OS to load. If I choose linux, there's no problem cause each time I can use predefined initrd and kernel which can be both defined directly to pxelinux. The problem appears when I try to access a iscsi or aoe partition directly using gPXE. I can setup pxelinux menu to handle undionly.kpxe (undionly.0) to the client and I also have a string in dhcpd.conf with "option root-path" which is fixed. The problem is with this method I can only setup ONE fided root-path to each client which can't be changed during startup. So if I have root-path defined to boot win2k3 using iscsi, I can only run that OS on that single client. If I want to run another OS on that same client, then I have to edit dhcpd.conf, replace the root-path and restart dhcpd server. After that I can start the client from pxelinux boot menu and new root-path.
So, my question is, how, if possible, can I solve this problem?

I'd like to have it like that:


PXELINUX PXE BOOT MENU with:

- Microsoft Windows 2k3 (pxelinux.0 -> undionly.0)
	filename="";
	option root-path "iscsi:192.168.1.100::::iqn.2008.fedora:target";

- Microsoft Windows XP (pxelinux.0 -> aoe.0)
	filename="aoe.0";
	option root-path "aoe:e0.0";

- Fedora Linux 8 (pxelinux.0 -> vmlinuz, initrd.img)


I was trying to do it myself, but I practically run out of ideas. The only thing I can think of is to make a web-based menu, where can each user with his username configure which operating system to boot at next restart. The script would change the contents of dhcpd.conf (root-path) and restart the dhcp server. But this is not a nice solution of course.

However, if you can in any way help me to reslove this situation, I would highly appreciate it.

Thanks in advance, Tomaz Kavcic (Slovenia).