D&C GLug - Home Page

[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]

[LUG] usb multiboot iso

 

I've been meaning to set one of these up for a long time - an 8Gb+ usb
drive with a bunch of distro isos in a folder that a bootloader
(probably grub2) can use to kickstart one of the many, many installers I
need. I'll want the netinstall isos for Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, SUSE,
Debian, Ubuntu, Slackware, systemrescuecd, GRML, Kali, etc. Bonus points
if it can boot Windows installer isos, Solaris, *BSD, XenServer, ESXi
and all the other stuff I need.

I know that grub2 can chainload almost everything and boot isos, so if
necessary I'll do it myself the hard way but that's going to be a big
fat headache to setup and a PITA to maintain. The internet tells me that
there are loads of tools already to do this (xboot, yumi, etc) but
they're mostly windows based (no idea what that is about as they mostly
come from a site calling itself "pendrivelinux"), not up to date and
limited in that they don't support many distributions/systems.

Before I roll up my sleeves and spend hours scripting this from scratch,
has anyone else been down this road before and done it for me? If it
wasn't for the fact that this tool will be needed for offline usage I'd
just dd ipxe to a usb stick and netboot off an install server. Plus it
would be an incredibly useful tool no matter how you look at it. A 64Gb+
usb stick with some persistent storage, room to dump backups to and
almost every iso you can think of in your pocket would cheer up most
sysadmins after all.

Yours hopefully

-- 
The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG
http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list
FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq