Thank you for this informative answer
I am excited to give this a shot again this weekend !
As for --keep , this other line of the manual threw me off
From sanboot ( https://ipxe.org/cmd/sanboot )
"This drive will be automatically detached if booting then fails, unless the --keep option is specified."
also
"For the sake of backwards compatibility, you can use the keep-san setting to prevent iPXE from detaching a SAN drive, and you can use the skip-san-boot setting to prevent iPXE from booting from a SAN drive. The combination of both of these settings provides functionality which is approximately equivalent to the sanhook command."
the sanhook page does not mention the word keep ( https://ipxe.org/cmd/sanhook )
and the page you refer to, doesn't exist ? ( https://ipxe.org/cfg/keep-san )
(screenshot posting is disabled ?)
That is quite a few pitfalls for beginners ! I hope they find this current topic in their future search !
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As for set initiator, I'm good for now, I have so many moving parts that aren't fitting together that for now I disabled access control entirely to remove it as a potential confounding factor in my trials !
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regarding clear net0.dhcp/gateway:ipv4
Thanks, I was really confused whether this was really existing and whether clearing the dhcp configuration would hurt rather than help, I have not yet tried it.
However there are cases where I would like a working gateway.
Case where the iscsi drive is on another network, I will probably cut my home network into several vlan separated networks so I assume I will need to set gateways to get accross networks.
But the case that interests me the most would be iscsi booting from one my of VPS in a datacenter in a provider like racknerd or linode
I don't know yet if iscsi over internet is possible but I've seen people claim it is possible.
I would like to carry a usb stick with ipxe on it, stick in into a random internet connected computer and boot into my own OS drive, even if it is slow and causes data corruption (disposable OS copies)
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For now I would be very happy to get through the windows install phase 1 until reboot without a bluescreen (the boot.wim part)
So if I understand correctly the pagefile issue and NDIS / LWF issues are not going to be a factor during phase 1 ?
So, it looks like the only thing I got wrong was the missing keep san !
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I don't really know what I"m going to do with installing and booting windows of a iscsi drive but my idea is like this
create vdo deduplicated thin LVM volumes, share over iscsi, install windows to my taste on it.
Then freeze a snapshot, and from any remote ipxe client, using ipxe + php scripts,
create new LVM volumes from the snapshot, iscsi share and then boot them
I imagine if this works I could create new windows OS as easily as I create new browser tabs and get rid of them just as easily.
Then repeat this process for every windows version, maybe all the way back to windows 95/dos and linux .
With a finely tuned snapshot of each OS, I would create new instances and put prepared software in them.
That way, I could for instance, summon a ready to use software package without having to maintain all that software at the same time on my computer all the time.
Example, photoshop CS6 offline running on windows 7, I only need that once in a blue moon so I don't really need it or even want that on my main computer, but with the setup I could have that software ready to go at any time. Like a piece of software frozen in time. It is possible that I'm just being silly.