[fog] Disable the boot menu

[edwardjrobertson]

Hi all,

 

Iv been doing work experience in a school using the old ghost that dosent support multicasting so last week I setup Fog. All works perfectly and for free it is very impressive. The school are going to carry on using it but there is one small issue that other people must of come across.

 

When a machine is setup to boot from lan as first device it will go to Fog menu. I know you can put the timeout to a second but the network manager dosent want the studemts to be able to mess about. We know there is a password etc but he wants a way to go straight past the menu.

 

Before I set up Fog I had a play around with the vmware image. When using that the machines didnt show the fog menu they went to xp. But when i created a task everything still worked

 

any suggestions?

 

Dont no if this was luck - was making an image and half way through iploading accidently turned the server off, at the power. When it booted back up the image just carried on uploading from where it were

[tmcd35]

Set your hard drives to 1st boot priority in the bios boot order and set a bios password. So long as PXE/network/Lan booting is enabled in the bios you should be able to push F12 at the bios boot screen when you first turn the computer on to get it network booting. If you don't push F12 then the computer will boot straight from hdd as normal.

 

unfortuantly there is nothing (i know of) that you can do to stop the students pressing F12 at the same point. Unless you only enable network boot in the bios when you actually need it.

 

For added security (I don't use FOG so don't rightly know) if FOG allows you to set an admin password to log into it then set that as well.

[teky]

Hi, We use FOG here and on the boot menu have set passwords on all the options apart from boot to hard disk, so the only option that they can choose that will work is hard disk. The only way they could bypass this is if they were able to gain access to the fog configuration somehow, which is impossible here.

[edwardjrobertson]

Thanks for the replys but its not what we are looking for.

 

We already have the password set and we want it to boot from lan so everything can be done remotly - in theory.

 

The netman just dosent want the students to be able to see the menu even though they cant do anything.

[maniac]

Have you tried setting the menu timeout to Zero?

 

Mike.

[teky]

If your adventurious then you could play with the graphics and change it all to black so if you can't set the time to 0 then have a least a 1 secound delay with nothing showing, will look into it more tomorrow though

[edwardjrobertson]

The time limit has to be 1 or above.

 

I was going to change the background, add the school logo is that something that is allowed with open source or not?

[CyberNerd]

When a machine is setup to boot from lan as first device it will go to Fog menu. I know you can put the timeout to a second but the network manager dosent want the studemts to be able to mess about. We know there is a password etc but he wants a way to go straight past the menu.

 

If you don't want to change the config in the bios (it is hassle reconfiguring all the bioses when you need t re-image)

you could make a new default file that boots to hdd only.

backup the old one

 

cp /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default /tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg/default.bak  

 

then create a new file that has no menu, instead it would just say:

 

DEFAULT localboot 0 

 

or try and just edit the file and replace "DEFAULT vesamenu.c32" with DEFAULT localboot 0 and keep the rest of the file intact

 

EDIT:

I think you might want to say

DEFAULT fog.local

instead. have a play with it.

 

/edit

I think that might work.

 

clearly you will have to undo your changes when you next want to use the pxe bootmenu.

 

I was going to change the background, add the school logo is that something that is allowed with open source or not?

 

yes you can.

Edited August 17, 2009 by CyberNerd

[edwardjrobertson]

Thanks "CyberNerd" will have a look at it tomorow.

 

There is actually no need to use the boot menu - we will do everything from the web page.

 

Will post back the results

[edwardjrobertson]

Problem sorted

 

Changed the default menu to fog.local

 

Thanks again