[ipxe-devel] menu.c32/vesamenu.c32 config generation

Matthew Walster matthew at walster.org
Wed Apr 27 20:56:52 UTC 2011


I've become sick and tired of hand-crafting menu.cfg files for
menu.c32, and if you try and make your life easier by making lots of
small files that include each other (like boot.kernel.org does) the
load time gets a little too slow for my liking.

There are obviously projects like pxeknife that do a lot of this work
for you, and for 90% of the tasks you want to do,
netboot.me/boot.kernel.org "do the job" - but I'd quite like to
replicate this on my own, being able to select though a web interface
or similar the kinds of things I want to include, the versions I want,
the kickstart files etc I want, and most of all - to make my life
lazier =)

I've seen a few attempts at generating these files out on the web, but
by and large they fill "someone else's need" and don't have the kind
of customisability your modern netbooting environment requires.

Does anyone else have this itch? Does anyone else want to help scratch
it? I was thinking we could knock together something as a team and
replicate some of the netboot.me functionality, but not tied to the
Google App Engine so that it's:

a) Easy to fork
b) Easy to maintain
c) Able to act as a beacon, shouting "look how cool netbooting is!"

Any takers?

M

NB) I mean no disrespect to the boot.kernel.org team etc, they do a
fantastic job - but I was hoping for something that was a little
more... SysAdmin friendly.



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