My iPXE setup is coming along just lovely, and it is working out just fine. My goal is to avoid scurrying around like a headless chicken looking for USB flash drives and optical media whenever I have to work on someone’s system. This part usually takes the most out of me when I am fixing a system as I can never seem to find install media, usb drives and my tools. I sure wish I could network boot my tools! I’m trying to become more organized in that regard :-).
I want a menu with all my utilities, which just allows me to network boot the thing and be done with it! I don’t want to ever have to go looking for Windows XP, Windows 7 or Ubuntu install media. I just want to load them up over the network. I also want to play some more with iSCSI, be able to boot Ubuntu and Openelec from my NAS.
I found this preconfigured iPXE menu project on github and I was able to install and get this running. The instructions are pretty straight forward, in my case I had to EMBED the bootstrap script in my ‘undionly.kpxe’. I am still in the process of commenting out the items I don’t need but it is a good look and I can’t wait to show this off to my more nerdy friends who I sure will not be impressed :-).
I think I will have to get a Gigabit router 🙂 and a better motherboard for my NAS.