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

[Andrew Stuart]

On 4/27/2011 1:56 PM, Matthew Walster wrote:
> 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.

I'm interested, although I am not a developer and I have next to no 
time. I do know enough php/mysql to hang myself. I have been working on 
doing something similar to this in my spare time over the last few days. 
I'm currently in the research / can I get this thing off the ground stage..

Out of curiosity, have you seen http://labs.aobac.net/boot/menu.html ? 
It does appear to solve your requirement of being lazy. From what I have 
had a chance to digest, it's a perl script that looks at a directory and 
builds custom menu configurations based on whats in the sub-directories 
at run time, thus a dynamic system.

-A