Screen session with PXE

Run unattended Clonezilla live via PXE booting and the process can be remotely monitored

Run Clonezilla in screen session so you can access remotely to monitor the progress

1. First, you have to setup a PXE server. You may refer to this doc.

2. We'd like to change the default password (live) to another one, e.g. iloveclonezilla. By running this on GNU/Linux (e.g. Clonezilla live) command line prompt:

   mkpasswd -m sha-256 iloveclonezilla
   $5$QF6o03o/iNM7NEnk$Ba6QZrT055.T1tFIL.CKwjwLt04TBqpCcjprKdWOGS5

   Then you get the encrypted password $5$QF6o03o/iNM7NEnk$Ba6QZrT055.T1tFIL.CKwjwLt04TBqpCcjprKdWOGS5, so later we can use usercrypted=$5$QF6o03o/iNM7NEnk$Ba6QZrT055.T1tFIL.CKwjwLt04TBqpCcjprKdWOGS5 (Remember to use backslash to escape dollar sign if you use grub, i.e., usercrypted=$5$QF6o03o/iNM7NEnk$Ba6QZrT055.T1tFIL.CKwjwLt04TBqpCcjprKdWOGS5). We want Clonezilla to restore the image lenny-i386-partclone (which is on a NFS server) to client's disk hda. The complete session of Clonezilla live

   label Clonezilla-live
   MENU LABEL Clonezilla Live 2.2.2-37 (Ramdisk)
   KERNEL vmlinuz1
   APPEND initrd=initrd1.img boot=live union=aufs nolocales vga=788 ip= noprompt usercrypted=$5$QF6o03o/iNM7NEnk$Ba6QZrT055.T1tFIL.CKwjwLt04TBqpCcjprKdWOGS5 fetch=tftp://192.168.120.254/Clonezilla-live-filesystem.squashfs ocs_daemonon="ssh" keyboard-layouts=NONE ocs_live_batch="no" locales="en_US.UTF-8" ocs_prerun="mount -t nfs 192.168.120.254:/home/partimag /home/partimag" ocs_live_run="screen ocs-sr -g auto -e1 auto -e2 --batch -j2 -p reboot restoredisk lenny-i386-partclone hda"

3. Then after client machine is booted via PXE, you can ssh login into it with account user and passwd iloveclonezilla, then:

   • sudo -i
   • screen -x

You are in the screen session now. You should be able to see the restoring process before it's rebooted.

For more boot parameters, please refer to this doc.