Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 20:10:15 -0600 (MDT) From: Warren Block <wblock@wonkity.com> To: Daniel Feenberg <feenberg@nber.org> Cc: freebsd-net@freebsd.org, Alex Aminoff <aminoff@nber.org> Subject: Re: Network booting FreeBSD with gpxelinx almost works Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.00.1009252001260.87995@wonkity.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.4.64.1009251809340.6663@nber6.nber.org> References: <Pine.GSO.4.64.1009251809340.6663@nber6.nber.org>
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On Sat, 25 Sep 2010, Daniel Feenberg wrote: > We have been network booting FreeBSD for some time with pxeboot. So I am > confident that we have the dhcpd.conf and the root filesystem sufficient for > diskless booting. But now we would like to have menu of OSs to boot and got > the idea somewhere that gpxelinux could do that for us. We copied gpxelinux.0 > from the syslinux-4.02 distribution and replaced pxeboot with "gpxelinux" in > the dhcpd.conf file. Indeed with a configuration file in pxelinux.cfg like > this: > > default freebsd > label freebsd > PXE pxeboot > > and the root path still specified as a DHCP option, FreeBSD 8.1 does boot. If > I replace the first line with: > > UI menu.c32 > > the client does display the menu and but if one hits return to select the > single item offered the client merely hangs for a minute, then announces > "boot failure". I am guessing that once the UI is interposed, somehow the > root path isn't getting transmitted to pxeboot. 4.01 works, both with menu.c32 and vesamenu.c32. I can't say I've experimented much farther, but used it when writing this: http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/pxe.html > All the other gpxelinux boot kernels seem to expect the information > about the root filesystem to be specified in the pxelinux.cfg file, > rather than in dhcpd.conf. FreeBSD's pxeboot isn't as versatile as others. > Does anyone have experience with this? FreeBSD isn't mentioned > anywhere I can find in the syslinux or gpxelinux documentation, and > the various web posting I have found linking FreeBSD to gpxelinux are > all about do installations of iso files over the net. Yes, that's one of the reasons I wrote the article above.
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