Change boot source to boot from custom ISO

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1

Hi All,

I have my custom ISOs are on one of the http server. Can you please help me what will the steps to change the source to my http server and boot from my custom ISO?

Thanks

2

using a golden image is a bad way

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Hi there, the easiest way to use custom images in maas is to upload them as a BootResource. You can also use a server assuming it supports the SimpleStreams API. However, if the ISO is just being served statically, a script that downloads the ISO and uploads it to MAAS might be your best option. In order to upload an image to MAAS you can run:

maas $PROFILE boot-resources create name=$NAME architecture=$ARCH filetype=ddraw content=@$PATH_TO_ISO

note the filetype being ddraw for the ISO format.

4

Hi! Thanks so much for posting this. Had a hard time getting this working. I blame snap and AppArmor but that’s a different problem. I was able to get a custom ISO loaded and accessible in the GUI. My use case is calling for using a bootable ISO during commissioning or rescue. I don’t want to load this on to disk.

You posted Select image used for commission per commission - #5 by cgrabowski here that custom images are not supported.

If I simply want to have MaaS boot a custom ISO that I have on a machine (let’s say it’s a rescue image of some sort, or something like a TinyLinux distro that is not part of the standard offerings), is there anyway to do this easily? I’m wanting to select a rescue image and restart a machine and let it do its thing.

This has been proving super difficult.

Thanks!

1 Like
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Hi @secondcity,

This is not a supported scenario by MAAS.

6

So I think the only way to do this is to use an iPXE.iso to boot into MaaS as a choice. This isn’t my favorite option, you loose some of the control from MaaS, but it seems to be the only viable solution.
Netbook.xyz has an iPXE.iso ISO image that does just this, right now the best solution, & what I’m working on setting up for myself right now, is to setup PXE for iVentoy, & have iVentoy have the default ISO to boot into MaaS, with an option for Netboot.xyz (which has all the tools you’re looking for like Live CD Linux & Rescuezilla & gParted & all that) as an option you could select before a timeout.
It’s definitely not ideal, but it’s the best I’ve come up with. Finding or figuring out how to make one for MaaS is the biggest roadblock (What led me here). Needing to have 3 PXE entities is annoying, but the other 2 combined take up ¹/10 the resources that MaaS does on its own so that’s not so bad. The other concern is going to be trying to run iVentoy & Netboot.xyz as Docker containers on the same machine, meaning I’ll need to figure out how to redirect to a custom port, but that’s a task for another day