On Thu, May 29, 2008 at 8:18 PM, Jason Spatafore <jasons@spatafore.net> wrote:

This may trigger some discussion and I've been researching it for days
now. It sounds like it is "impossible" but I wanted to utilize all my
resources. PLUG is a resource. :)

So, here's the situation.

1. I would like to use a system where servers can be PXEBooted to the network.
2. The system needs to be able to boot from image files after being PXEBooted. For example, image files can/will be .iso (CD-ROM), .usb (USB Drive Images created with dd), .img for floppy images, and .dvd for DVD based images.

Here's how I see the system working. A technician boots to the PXE environment and is presented a menu...say the menu is asking for an 8 digit number. The technician inputs the 8 digit number (12345678) and a script of some kind locates the corresponding image file. The script then determines the type of image that is used based off the extension. In this example, let's say the filename is 12345678.iso. The script now knows that it must use iso9660 for the filesystem. The script then loads that iso file and the system boots just like it was running from a CD-ROM.

Now, everything I have read so far states that this is impossible due to the way systems boot.

Does anybody have ideas on how to get something like this to work? Can you boot an ISO file *as if* it was a direct attached CD-ROM drive? Can you do the same with other image types?

I am trying to make this simple for our people. For example, I would like people to be able to just use dd to create the image files.

Anyway, any help/input is appreciated. Even confirmation that this is impossible would be nice as I have already come to that conclusion myself based off all the other items I've read online.

Thanks ahead of time!

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