On Monday 07 February 2005 08:19 pm, Ted Hilts wrote:

Darryl

I read the man page before I posted. I could not read from the man page or your "clues" the method or process of placing up to 64 alternatives. I don't want a Boot Diskette or CD for every machine -- I want one Boot Diskette or CD to use to boot up all my machines. This means every alternative could specify different machines as well as kernel modifications or even a different kernel as well as different Linux distributions. This makes the alternatives NOT relative to the ISO image on the Boot Disk. Your selection suggested to me that I cannot take a SuSE Boot Diskette or CD and use this to boot up another Linux machine -- just the machine from which the ISO was derived. In other words I cannot take the Boot Disk for machine #1 and use it to boot up machine #2. I can, it seems, provide alternative kernels as alternatives on the same machine, but that is not what I am looking at doing.

Thanks -- Ted

Please learn what GRUB is and what it does and then you'll see how easy this all is. I don't think at this point that you have a clue. What you want to do is very EASY with grub and you're just spinning your wheels until you learn something about boot loaders.

Darryl Gregorash wrote:

...

Again reading from the *manpage* yields a clue:

" -b eltorito_boot_image Specifies the path and filename of the boot image to be used when making an "El Torito" bootable CD. The pathname must be relative to the source path specified to mkisofs. This option is required to make an "El Torito" bootable CD. -eltorito-alt-boot Start with a new set of "El Torito" boot parameters. This allows to have more than one El Torito boot on a CD. A maximum of 63 El Torito boot entries may be put on a single CD."

Presumably, if we RTF[ine] *manpage* we may find further clues.

On Tuesday 08 February 2005 01:31 am, Sid Boyce wrote:

Bruce Marshall wrote:

...

On Monday 07 February 2005 08:19 pm, Ted Hilts wrote:

...

Darryl

I read the man page before I posted. I could not read from the man page or your "clues" the method or process of placing up to 64 alternatives. I don't want a Boot Diskette or CD for every machine -- I want one Boot Diskette or CD to use to boot up all my machines. This means every alternative could specify different machines as well as kernel modifications or even a different kernel as well as different Linux distributions. This makes the alternatives NOT relative to the ISO image on the Boot Disk. Your selection suggested to me that I cannot take a SuSE Boot Diskette or CD and use this to boot up another Linux machine -- just the machine from which the ISO was derived. In other words I cannot take the Boot Disk for machine #1 and use it to boot up machine #2. I can, it seems, provide alternative kernels as alternatives on the same machine, but that is not what I am looking at doing.

Thanks -- Ted

Please learn what GRUB is and what it does and then you'll see how easy this all is. I don't think at this point that you have a clue. What you want to do is very EASY with grub and you're just spinning your wheels until you learn something about boot loaders.

...

Darryl Gregorash wrote:

...

Again reading from the *manpage* yields a clue:

" -b eltorito_boot_image Specifies the path and filename of the boot image to be used when making an "El Torito" bootable CD. The pathname must be relative to the source path specified to mkisofs. This option is required to make an "El Torito" bootable CD. -eltorito-alt-boot Start with a new set of "El Torito" boot parameters. This allows to have more than one El Torito boot on a CD. A maximum of 63 El Torito boot entries may be put on a single CD."

Presumably, if we RTF[ine] *manpage* we may find further clues.

Seems he needs each machine to be a boot server.

I re-read what he wrote and that is not clear to me. All he said was he wanted a CD or a diskette that will boot all machines. That can be read as "I want to make 10 copies of that CD and put it in all 10 machines" or "just one disk and I can put it in any of 10 machines". I can't imagine why anyone would need a 'boot server' but if so, he's waaay out of my ballpark.

The simplest solution would be to build a cluster from identical machines using something like clusterknoppix, but even that doesn't seem to fit the requirement. If this was offered to me as a consultant, I'd take it on if the money was good for success or failure. Mixes of distros, kernels, arp broadcasts going hither and dither etc., it seems a very and overly complex ask - not knowing the hardware configurations is another problem, he could, if hardware is identical, install multiple distros on one, then clone the disk(s). Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and Keen Flyer =====ALMOST ALL LINUX USED HERE, Solaris 10 SPARC is just for play=====

Darryl Do I hurry off to learn more about Boot Disks as this is just a "simple" exercise using Grub as some suggest -- one I am too dense to appreciate as others suggest? Or what? I'm too old to go back to school, I'll probably be dead before the next class graduates, if not that then certainly more dense than I am now. Hope to see some feed back on the list on your considerations as they seem to echo what I want to do and some of the same concerns (valid or invalid). But maybe neither of us appreciate the 'simplicity' when done on GRUB. I'll admit that I can be dense but not just because someone says I am. I am prepared to gather the disk structure and other boot attributes (once I know what to gather) required to do this thing. I know very little about setting up GRUB other than the information in the SuSE reference manual. So maybe I do need to learn more about GRUB, but I'm willing to do that only if I can do this thing, That's what I am trying to determine. I have too many people contradicting each other here and feel I need a working example that would settle the feasibility of doing this thing. Help is help only when it really helps solve the problem. There is too much of this "Go get lost and read about it at such an such a place". I don't have a trillion years to figure this out. And, I'm not the least interested in finding out WHY I cannot do this thing. That's why I want an example, (at least 2 machines with different OS). Oddly enough and if the issue is so simple, why has no one an example to provide me even though it is a "simple" chore for the boot informed -- which obviously I'm not because it does not seem simple to me -- but then I'm dense. Thanks -- TED or Ted (whatever you prefer)

Actually, on first glance I believe that it can be done, but it is a very tall order, and unlike Sid, not one I would readily take on, for any fee. The only solution I can think of off the top of my head (and do note it is still very much just a vague outline of what might be possible, perhaps and maybe) is one which would require the user to make a choice at boot, based on which machine was being booted. That leaves a lot of room for error, particularly if there is a menu with up to 63 choices. I suppose you could use the menu titles to indicate which choice to make: "Fred's computer, Print Server, Gateway system" and so on, but still....

I'm tossing out this next thought solely for others to munch on, so please do not take any action based on it. I believe a possible solution may begin with the creation of a single boot floppy for each system you want to include on the CD or DVD. These would then have to be brought to one single system as disk images (similar to the bootdisk* files for doing ftp installs of SuSE), and subsequently written to a master CD/DVD image using the mkisofs -b and -eltorito-alt-boot options, perhaps also -no-emul-boot. The mkisofs commandline might look something like this:

mkisofs -o CD_image -c boot.catalog -b bootimage1 -eltorito-alt-boot -b bootimage2 ....

Anyone have any thoughts on this? I have absolutely no idea where -no-emul-boot would go in a scheme like this, and I am certainly not sure if only one -c flag is correct -- Google, anyone? :-).

Patrick Shanahan wrote:

* Ted Hilts [02-09-05 19:14]:

...

I have too many people contradicting each other here and feel I need a working example that would settle the feasibility of doing this thing. Help is help only when it really helps solve the problem. There is too much of this "Go get lost and read about it at such an such a place". I don't have a trillion years to figure this out. And, I'm not the least interested in finding out WHY I cannot do this thing. That's why I want an example, (at least 2 machines with different OS). Oddly enough and if the issue is so simple, why has no one an example to provide me even though it is a "simple" chore for the boot informed -- which obviously I'm not because it does not seem simple to me -- but then I'm dense.

Seems to me I saw a for-hire offer earlier in this thread. Since you feel overwhelmed by the task facing you, perhaps you should consider the offer.

you requested an example of a grub.conf file to work from: /boot/grub/menu.lst:

# Modified by YaST2. Last modification on Tue Dec 30 21:51:20 2003

color white/blue black/light-gray default 0 timeout 12 gfxmenu (hd0,8)/boot/message

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: linux### title Linux kernel (hd0,8)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda9 vga=0x31A splash=silent hdc=ide-scsi hdclun=0 hdh=ide-scsi hdhlun=0 showopts initrd (hd0,8)/boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: Linux - SuSE 8.1### title Linux - SuSE 8.1 kernel (hd0,6)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda7 hdc=ide-scsi hdh=ide-scsi acpi=off apm=on vga=794 initrd (hd0,6)/boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: windows### title Windows root (hd0,0) chainloader +1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: floppy### title Floppy root (fd0) chainloader +1

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: failsafe### title Failsafe kernel (hd0,8)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda9 showopts ide=nodma apm=off acpi=off vga=normal nosmp noapic maxcpus=0 3 initrd (hd0,8)/boot/initrd

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: Memory Test### title Memory Test kernel (hd0,8)/boot/memtest.bin

###Don't change this comment - YaST2 identifier: Original name: original_mbr### title MBR before Installation chainloader (hd0,8)/boot/backup_mbr

Each partition listed could have a different distro installed on it, I've dealt with a box for an ex-colleague who had Win2K, RedHat, Mandrake and SuSE 8.2 installed. We added another partition with SuSE 9.0 on it, so he could boot whatever he needed. With 2 identical machines, hard disks cloned and rsync run to keep both pretty much the same, that's about the closest I can get to what is required as far as I can guess. However, if the hardware is different, you've just cancelled out flexibility. The more complex you make a setup, the more you impact reliability, simplicity has a lot to recommend it. I'm still not clear on what advantages are sought - the thinking behind it all. I've got 5 Linux machines, 1 SuSE 9.2 x86, 1 laptop SuSE 9.2 x86_64, a P-II/333 laptop SuSE 9.2 x86, 1 Mandrake 10.1 box with DVB card and 1 gentoo box. The critical files and directories, I rsync across to other boxes so I have accessible backups on multiple machines. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce .... Hamradio G3VBV and Keen Flyer =====ALMOST ALL LINUX USED HERE, Solaris 10 SPARC is just for play=====

Ted, once again, one reply only please, to the list. And please do stop the editorial commentaries in teh subject line; if they are sincere they are embarrassing for me, while if sarcastic, offensive. I make no judgement. Ted Hilts wrote:

Darryl Do I hurry off to learn more about Boot Disks as this is just a "simple" exercise using Grub as some suggest -- one I am too dense to appreciate as others suggest? Or what? I'm too old to go back to school, I'll probably be dead before the next class graduates, if not that then certainly more dense than I am now.

Hope to see some feed back on the list on your considerations as they seem to echo what I want to do and some of the same concerns (valid or invalid). But maybe neither of us appreciate the 'simplicity' when done on GRUB. I'll admit that I can be dense but not just because someone says I am. I am prepared to gather the disk structure and other boot attributes (once I know what to gather) required to do this thing. I know very little about setting up GRUB other than the information in the SuSE reference manual. So maybe I do need to learn more about GRUB, but I'm willing to do that only if I can do this thing, That's what I am trying to determine.

I have too many people contradicting each other here and feel I need a working example that would settle the feasibility of doing this thing. Help is help only when it really helps solve the problem. There is too much of this "Go get lost and read about it at such an such a place". I don't have a trillion years to figure this out. And, I'm not the least interested in finding out WHY I cannot do this thing. That's why I want an example, (at least 2 machines with different OS). Oddly enough and if the issue is so simple, why has no one an example to provide me even though it is a "simple" chore for the boot informed -- which obviously I'm not because it does not seem simple to me -- but then I'm dense.

First off, you get contradicting results because different people interpret your words in different ways. That is not intended as a criticism of your grammatical abilities, but only as a suggestion that sometimes we may need to feel around a bit before we all grasp the correct nature of the problem. As for the "simplicity" of doing this on GRUB, while I am no expert, I can tell you with some degree of confidence that what I believe you wish to accomplish is either excessively complicated, or trivial and hence meaningless, or impossible. In reverse order: you cannot possibly have one vanilla boot source that can distinguish between this network card or that, this SCSI device or that, booting from any of a rather long list of possible boot devices, and so on. You cannot possibly have one vanilla boot source that can distinguish between all the different kernels that are installed, or that can anticipate all the variations on where specific directories are mounted (which physical device, that is -- maybe machine A has a separate /boot partition, but B does not). The "generic" solution is thus impossible. This leaves us with two alternatives. First, you can make every single system bootable, and simply use "chainloader" in the GRUB menu on the boot CD to chain to the MBR of the computer's boot device. This assumes that all systems boot from the same source type, IDE or SCSI or anything else that is allowed doesn't matter, so long as they are all the same. If not, here is where the first potential complication arises: you must now make two or more menu choices, to select chaining to an IDE or SCSI or whatever boot device. But why bother? Just boot directly from the system itself, hence this solution is trivial and meaningless. Now we get to the excessive complication. That is what I already suggested, and it is really nothing more than an academic exercise, particularly since you are under time constraints. Yes, it probably can be done along the lines I suggested (but be prepared to have a lot of new coasters for the office trying to get the proper mkisofs commandline), but that would mean a separate boot image, on the CD, for each and every distinct hardware/OS/partitioning combination you have. Each separate boot image means another menu entry, and now you must memorize which menu choice to make for each particular system. If you have any dual-boot systems, now you also require a separate menu item for each distinct configuration and layout for that. That is why I said I would be reluctant to take on this task for any amount of money -- and I can count pretty high :-) I hope Patrick's GRUB menu is of some help to you, but do note it is for a single machine, not many. I leave you for now with a quote from Sid's post: "The more complex you make a setup, the more you impact reliability, simplicity has a lot to recommend it."