I think we’re finally getting very close to having built-in support for windows! However, I notice, while drafting a blog post, that I still need to install the latest syslinux v6; which is a pitty since this, for me, breaks built-in support. Unfortunately, EPEL7 only provides the older v4 binaries, which are too old to support windows.
I think it would be nice to include the v6 rpms, which can also be found on the EL8 repos, on the foreman repo. As soon as that is availeble, I can file a patch to, by default, also include IPXE binaries in the installer config.
I noticed I already made an issue for this last year:
I anyone could point me in the right direction on how to make this happen?
BTW: I know that CentOS/RHEL 8 is out, and this probably is a transient problem, nevertheless, CentOS 7 is still used a lot I think (even more because upgrading CentOS to 8 is actually a reinstall )
Since CentOS 8 is already out, I suggest to simply ignore the syslinux problem and ask users to update it manually as the issue will disappear in the future. Shipping our own version of this package is not good, we’ve been doing this for ipxe a little but it was not the best experience. Let’s avoid that.
Meaning, it’s best to explain the addition of the additional files via the foreman installer in a separate blog post?
For me that’s ok, perhaps, if we ever deprecate CentOS7 support we can then add this as a default setting?
To elaborate on my reply:
Since we’re not going to support the latest PXELinux on CentOS 7, it would perhaps be best to, for now, include the update steps and configuration steps as part of a blog post/documentation page regarding “setting up Foreman for windows deployments”.
The second part:
I suspect that at some point in time, we’ll deprecate support for CentOS 7, after which the PXE files can be included in the default installation, and the documentation page, as described above, can be removed again; resulting in foreman out-of-the-box supporting windows without any further configuration.
Another approach, although more complex probably, could be to try and determine the version of syslinux supported on that OS and adjust the list of PXE files to include accordingly… Which would be a good user experience IMHO but might not be possible (I really don’t know anything regarding how the installer works actually )
For me, this sounds better because a blog post might get lost while if we add the instructions here, we can easily point to it or search for it in the future.
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