From owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Sep 3 10:16:58 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 012DC16A4BF; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 10:16:58 -0700 (PDT) Received: from kientzle.com (h-66-166-149-50.SNVACAID.covad.net [66.166.149.50]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5B9DE43FCB; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 10:16:56 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kientzle@acm.org) Received: from acm.org ([66.166.149.54]) by kientzle.com (8.12.9/8.12.9) with ESMTP id h83HGtkX010475; Wed, 3 Sep 2003 10:16:55 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from kientzle@acm.org) Message-ID: <3F562207.5080907@acm.org> Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 10:16:55 -0700 From: Tim Kientzle User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; FreeBSD i386; en-US; rv:1.3.1) Gecko/20030524 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Josef Karthauser References: <20030902205418.GB30374@genius.tao.org.uk> In-Reply-To: <20030902205418.GB30374@genius.tao.org.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit cc: hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Booting a machine over the network without pxe. X-BeenThere: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: kientzle@acm.org List-Id: Technical Discussions relating to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 03 Sep 2003 17:16:58 -0000 Josef Karthauser wrote: > Does anyone have any experience of booting a machine over the > network, like pxeboot, but without running PXE on a network card. > I imagine that it should be possible to load pxeboot at the boot: > prompt and have everything just work. pxeboot requires that you have a PXE BIOS available. Loosely speaking, PXE is three different things: * A BIOS that provides basic network operations, * A "multicast" TFTP that is designed for rapidly network booting very large numbers of machines simultaneously. (Few people use this; fewer people need it.) * A network boot model in which the PXE BIOS loads a "network boot loader" that then uses the PXE BIOS services to load and boot an OS kernel. The network boot model for PXE closely mirrors the traditional model for booting a PC from hard disk: BIOS loads boot loader that uses BIOS services to load OS. Note that without the PXE BIOS, the 'pxeboot' program is useless, since it relies on the PXE BIOS services. If you want to load the kernel over the network, you need something that knows how to talk to your network adapter. If it ain't in ROM, it has to come from somewhere else. However, there is another approach. You can do a "partial netboot" by loading the kernel from disk (maybe even a floppy?) and then doing a classic netboot after that. Just enable the BOOTP and BOOTP_NFSROOT options in the kernel and load it from disk. The rest is "just" server configuration. Hint: If you statically compile everything necessary into your kernel, this is all much simpler. Good luck, Tim Kientzle