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Date:      Sun, 1 Apr 2012 20:44:31 -0400
From:      Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble@gmail.com>
To:        FreeBSD Net <freebsd-net@freebsd.org>
Subject:   PXE Boot vmware 8.x fails after pxeboot.
Message-ID:  <CACpH0McEdq824muqFRqLGhZn_vKFsOWZjOSBUd_0hmNw2FPfbA@mail.gmail.com>

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I have had diskless FreeBSD machines before.  I started this project
with an eye to booting iscsi disks, but there seems to be no way to
communicate the root disk path (and parameters) to FreeBSD ---
something that might be solvable, but I need practical at the moment.
So I fall back on NFS diskless with PXE boot (I may have used
etherboot in the past --- it's been awhile).

Anyways... this attempt is made with FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE binaries.

In my network, 192.168.0.1 is the DHCP and TFTP server.  192.168.0.52
is my NFS server.  The new vmware guest is bridged and gets
192.168.0.135.  It successfully gets 'pxeboot' onto the vmware guest
--- pxeboot prints it's banner.  Then the only network traffic I
observe is DHCP Discover (vmware, presumably the pxeboot binary)
followed by DHCP Offer (192.168.0.1 again) and this repeats.

Now the dhcp offer gives a root path of
"192.168.0.52:/vr/diskless/hit" ... and I've tried it with and without
a trailing slash.

Obviously this is something within the pxeboot's binary as no attempt
to make the nfs mount occurs.



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