creating menus

[errorsmith]

Hi

I'm trying to set up a bootmenu for my computers for days now. A user booting from the net should be able to select from a number of options, including booting from an iSCSI target, his local harddisk (if any), loading a number of installers (Linux, FreeBSD) or loading several rescue / backup / diagnosis tools.

Unfortunately I'm failing in creating any option to get sanboot working.

So just a general question:
What is the recommended way to create bootmenus these days?
I've come to ipxe the long way, first trying out pxelinux, then gpxe. Unfortunately the first one isn't documented at all (website's down for ages), the second doesn't boot correctly (trying to use some cached values, then bails out / hangs).

I'm able to boot from any iSCSI target I want to, either via the ipxe built-in shell or via any ipxe script. But I'm not able to create a nice menu for it.

First I tried to use the menu.c32 supplied with pxelinux. This lets me create a menu, but neither chain back to ipxe correctly (loads undionly but then reloads the menu, aka infinite loop and I can't find a way to pass the correct ipxe script as a parameter to it), nor use sanboot.c32 (complains about missing API and bails out too). Chaining into gpxe or gpxelinux didn't work either: Either it hangs trying to load its configfile (pxelinux.cfg/default) or, if this worked, it fails accessing the network complainging about timeouts.
Again: iPXE works like a charm, but without menus and menu.c32 seems to work as long as I "only" load an image as kernel (i.e. live system or CD Image using memdisk).

Currently dhcp (ISC DHCPD 3) is configured to hand out undionly.kpxe first hand, and, after ipxe does its own dhcp request, hand out bootmenu.cfg as filename. This gets loaded correctly. From there I'm able to boot from an iSCSI target or load any Image or boot into a diskless configured FreeBSD and so on. But no menu.

So again: How can one set up a nice menu including booting from any iSCSI target, preferrably without setting up a webserver and writing custom php scripts, but using a static configuration like in the old days with pxelinux and menu.c32. Setting up a webserver would be heavy overkill for me

with kind regards,
errorsmith