Programs I found of Interest

[Curtis8]

Have come across these neat little programs. Was wanting anyone to give their thoughts on them.
WSUS Offline Update
netboot.me

Let me know what you think

[ternarybit]

I am having a lot of fun with netboot.me. It's very useful, like a pocket knife of bootable images. You can create custom configs for your own apps like PING, but I'm having trouble pointing it to a local server to host the kernel and initrd.gz. It works with a remote host but it loads very slowly. If I can get local resources to load, this would be great as a frontend to load any and all useful tools, including full ISOs of tools!

[Curtis8]

I expect that a local server could take some work. I will look into that as soon as I can.

[ternarybit]

I expect that a local server could take some work. I will look into that as soon as I can.

Well I already have a local ubuntu server running apache, so that's already done. But the netboot.me customization pages only allow fully-qualified domain names (as in http://server.local/initrd.gz). IPs and plain netbios hostnames do not work (the page sanity check says please enter a valid URL). so like http://server/initrd.gz and http://192.168.1.1/initrd.gz do not work, even though typing those into a browser loads the file just fine.

In other words, it's a quirk with the way netboot.me works, not a server configuration problem. I spoke to the author who has not gotten back to me about changing the sanity check to allow local resources outside of a domain.

[Curtis8]

Well my IPCop Firewall responds to firewall.eliteprogramming.com so I expect it will work just fine for me. Your server must have a FQDN or something of the like. But maybe not. What are you using as a router? Set it with a DNS Suffix and use that as your FQDN.

[ternarybit]

Well my IPCop Firewall responds to firewall.eliteprogramming.com so I expect it will work just fine for me. Your server must have a FQDN or something of the like. But maybe not. What are you using as a router? Set it with a DNS Suffix and use that as your FQDN.

Hmm, good idea. I really would like to use this, but I must confess I'm not familiar with configuring a local FQDN. I did just set my router's DNS suffix to .local, but http://server.local does not return anything. Must I configure something on the server-side?

[Curtis8]

It actually has more to do with your DHCP and the Connection DNS.

Ethernet adapter Elite Network:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : EliteProgramming.com
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : NVIDIA nForce Networking Controller
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-0F-EA-EF-F4-99
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.42.102
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : fe80::20f:eaff:feef:f499%4
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.42.100
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.42.100
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.42.100

[Wyoguy]

You can simply add IP/Names to your hosts file to do the equivalent of a FQDN from DNS.

Can't you edit the /etc/hosts file of the netboot.me iso image?

[ternarybit]

Well this is turning out to be much more trouble than it's worth. A simple sanity check correction would make things much easier, so I can just put local hostnames in netboot's config, or at least enter IP addresses. I don't understand why the developer wouldn't allow such input.

[Curtis8]

I find it odd as well that an IP address is not allowed. Everything even the names need to become an IP at some point so would it not save a step for the netboot process?

[Natan]

Hi there,
I've just tested wsusoffline and netboot.me
I couldn't test much wsusoffline, because I'm behind a proxy, and my password proxy contains a @ char, which is already used to prefix the server string. Anyway, I've seen the first screen, looked at the AutoIt scripts, and found it useful for IT pros. We just can't lose our time downloading each KB from Microsoft.

Netboot.me is something different. I like the idea, and have looked for long for something like this. But I'm more interested into Etherboot, which has been used by the Netboot.me developer. In particular, I'm interested in the fact that gPXE seems to make it possible, from a Linux shell, to load a kernel and start another initrd, including a Win32 OS (PE or not). It would be amazing if PING could be booted from any kind of PXE, as usual, then connect to the network (it does it fairly well, and will probably always do it better than a very small PXE OS), make a few changes in the local HDD (partitions / profile backups / etc.), then launch a WIM to have any kind of Windows installed the latest way. Or maybe I've not understood what gPXE could do from the command line ?

Natan

[Natan]

Was wrong. Will only add a http capability to good ol' Syslinux. Sigh.

[Curtis8]

Well it looked interesting...
Maybe we would have to have our PING added to the Netboot site?

[Natan]

Would be a nice step... Anyway, they are helping the Cause

[ternarybit]

May be offtopic, but here's my situation.

Small office (<20 nodes) manager, I use these programs very regularly: PING, gparted/parted magic, clonezilla, trinity rescue kit (TRK), memtest 86+, Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) & occasionally KNOPPIX. I have a TFTP server set up to host PING, which works quite nicely.

All of the above except PING must be loaded from optical media which gets tedious especially with new versions. Is there any program out there that can act as a "boot menu" for TFTP? I would like to boot to LAN, then get a prompt similar to UBCD's where it just lets me select which app I want to suck through the network from my fileserver and run it. I thought netboot.me would do that but it seems to only work with remotely hosted stuff (which seems ludicrous, but whatever).

Does anyone know a way I can somewhat easily load multiple initrds over PXE with some sort of simple menu? I have both XP and linux platforms so whichever works is OK. Thank you!