A Quick howto use pxe booting in acronis true image enterprise server 9.1 (all)

Hi People,

I would just like to share my experience and getting things running in acronis true image server 9.1.

Scenario: School in uk, for quick imaging to pc's and servers incase of disk failure.
Don't want to mess around with CD's or floppys or any other silly removable media.

PXE is the quick solution. Trialed out the acronis product, worked satisfactory.

Then tried the pxe soloution, EEK! refused to boot from any pc? Looked on this forum, a few people had the same problem. A few suggestions from people where posted, but no real soloution to the issue. UNTIL NOW! Yipeee....

OK!, here's how i got it working - not perfect, but works really well.

First of all, the BAD news is that the RIS on a windows server doesnt work. I had to use a linux box to do all grunt work.

Here's the Steps:

1. This guy was the only one who seemed to get it to work https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=146713&highlight=kernel.dat

A bit confusing, and not really telling you how to get it working?

After searching around the internet i found this http://www.opensourcehowto.org/how-to/tftp/tftp--pxe--syslinux--g4l.html

Ok, i thought i'll put this to good use. I followed the instructions (testing on a spare pc), using a ubuntu dapper and not fedora. then...

2. On instruction number 11., i added this
LABEL acronistrue
MENU LABEL ^W: Acronis True Image
kernel boot/kernel.dat
append initrd=images/ramdisk.dat vga=791 ramdisk_size=32768 acpi=off quiet noapic

To the Default and labeled it W (Reason being that the latest G4L is 0.22, and has changed the menu list, you'll see once you download g4l.iso)

Obviously created the necessary folders in the /tftpboot folder = boot and images, then copyed the ramdisk.dat and kernel.dat from a pre made iso image.

3. I have two windows servers 2003 running the dhcp to the clients, so i had to add some entry's to the server options in the dhcp manager.

Option 66 and 67

Option 66 is the tftp server address, so i entered 172.16.0.12 or the dns name
then option 67
Option 67 is filename for booting, i entered pxelinux.0

I you dont enter the above then it takes the clients twice as long to find you tftp server, and most likely will have a "proxydhcp 40 error" come up on the client trying to boot.

Thats it!

So now i have Acronis true image pxe booting and G4L (Ghost4Linux), Cool!!!

If you are still a bit confused, send me a message or email me on db260179 [at] hotmail.com

 

A little more info... (i wish this thread was a sticky, cause it and the one it points to were invaluable to me)

Something else worth pointing out, if you go thru the "create bootable media for a RIS server" you get a bit more stuff thats also usefull (like the boot agent).

You can do this on samba for us Unix guys (otherwise just make some shares on a windows box somewhere called tmp and reminst):

Code:

[tmp]
    comment = tmpshare
    path = /tmp/reminst/2
    writable = yes
    public = no

[reminst]
    comment = reminstshare
    path = /tmp/reminst/1
    writable = yes
    public = no

Create the /tmp/reminst/1 and 2 directories manually, then create /tmp/reminst/1/OSChooser (make sure its all writable by whoever you login as from the media creation gui). When you then publish your code to the RIS server (either the machine with the samba shares or the windows box you created shares on) you'll get a big directory heirachy under /tmp/reminst/1/Setup/..../ (go right down until you can't go any further and you should see a bunch of dat?.dat files).

After that, have a good look at bootwiz.cfg and you'll see several kernel/initrd lines and from there as pointed out before you can now use these in pxelinux:

Code:

LABEL Acronis-1
        kernel /acronis/dat3.dat
        append initrd=/acronis/dat2.dat ramdisk_size=65535 acpi=off noapic vga=791 quiet

for each of the dat?.dat file pairs.

You can then boot each set to figure out what each does and give them appropriate labels.

Hopefully that explanation wasn't too short (by the way, i couldn't find it on the wish list, but is there already a wish to add decent pxelinux support?). Having acronis available this way tho - brilliant!

 

Hi,

You could have tried TFTP32 , it does TFTP (surprize!!) DHCP and sort of PXE.

Best of all, works under Windows, no need to install it just runs like that.

I used it to PXE BartPE with Acronis inside... thanx to PE2USB using Windows 2003 ram loader...

Nice work though, hope it works well for you, and you can deploy "Boot Agent" to take control over your computers remotely

Ciao

Jaycee

 

Hello db260179, Shihan and jaycee,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Remote Server Backup Software.

Sharing your experience is very much appreciated. If you have any further experience to share, please feel free to post it on this forum.

Thank you for the provided information.
--
Marat Setdikov