Date: Sat, 25 Sep 2010 19:21:33 -0400 (EDT) From: Daniel Feenberg <feenberg@nber.org> To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Cc: Alex Aminoff <aminoff@nber.org> Subject: Network booting FreeBSD with gpxelinx almost works Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.4.64.1009251809340.6663@nber6.nber.org>
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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. 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. 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.
Daniel Feenberg
NBER
http://www.nber.org/sys-admin/FreeBSD-diskless.html
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