Mirror Walker 0.6 Full

0.6 Release

Here we go. The end of the last week and these two days I refactored the big part of the project, added ISO support and reworked bunch of things.

This release allows you to walk trough rsync mirror and get the list of all the available PXE boot files and ISO images in a simple (i)PXE menu, which now loads much faster (3 mins were cut to a couple of seconds). You can choose your own PXE configuration directory and Linux mirror (by default it uses mirror.yandex.ru and pxelinux.d, which are compatible with my PXE repo and site)

Changelog

• Added ISO support.
• Switched from vesamenu to menu.c32 to obtain higher loading speed.
• Switched from PXE menus to menu.c32 to obtain really higher first page loading speed. Now all the menus are loaded separately, what leads to some loading time between the menus, but much faster initialization
• Solved various bugs with navigation
• Refactorted templates, remove dummy checks, depending on indexes as much as I could
• Code style fixed in the whole project
• Now command line args can be used, so Usage now is:
  python3 main.py -p HEREISYOURPXEDIR -m HEREISYOURMIRROR
  They can be skipped or left blank, so walker will use its defaults.
• Average time of walking really depends on stability and connection speed, but for me it's usually 600-900 seconds.

ka2m.github.io

Here you can get all the various types of images for PXE booting and walking results in Yandex Mirrors. You are free to use these images to install images.

By the time of this release, I update walking results. (18:22 GMT+4)

Known issues

• non-distro ISOs: because of algorithm that checks availability of ISO images, walker puts in his pocket every ISO it founds. Please, verify on your own that you are loading the correct image. That's why you sometimes can find some VirtualBox Guest Additions images in the menu.

Mirror Walker Stable Release

This Thursday I devoted to testing the service and checking, fixing and maintaining bugs, appeared in it. Unfortunately, the way I add and work with ISO images works not quite correct (you can check it in first commits on pxeserver repo). For some distros it works fine, others don't really handle it properly. More, the menus look weird and they need to be re-build.

What does it mean? By now I can release a stable version, which will definitely work with all the distributions, which match Debian or Red-Hat templates. I manually checked most of them, so I guarantee that they boot these images.

I'm going to spend the end of this week with getting ISO images booting done, and, if some time left, I will think of reducing directory structure and optimizing data. Now pxelinux.d is about 5.6 MB, which is 3 times less than a version (around 16) with ISO images.

Mirror Walker Beta Release

I think that's a right time to sum up some results. During past tree week I was working on a script that can walk through any mirror which supports rsync and gather all the possible PXE configurations and ISO images, if the first are absent (now it collects even all the ISO images). By now it was tested on major distros like CentOS, Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu, loaded from Yandex Linux Mirror.

It can be really unstable, but at least the script successfully created configurations from three main repos that I know ant trust: Yandex, Kernel Mirrors and SGU repo.

You also may find PXE server configurations here with walked PXE directory (walked with this version), iPXE script and images. You can clone it and upload to any HTTP server, it should work, but you've got to update script and rebuild images.

Things that have to be done:

• Think of reducing directories structure.
• Make UI more compact and fancy
• Different optimization
• Refactoring