Date: Tue, 3 Apr 2012 01:27:05 -0400 From: Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble@gmail.com> To: FreeBSD Net <freebsd-net@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: PXE Boot vmware 8.x fails after pxeboot. Message-ID: <CACpH0Mdd4%2B7PVrhcp%2BPfa8fQ9Zg=HwX6v9pTbn4JUkuaane%2B5Q@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <CACpH0McEdq824muqFRqLGhZn_vKFsOWZjOSBUd_0hmNw2FPfbA@mail.gmail.com> References: <CACpH0McEdq824muqFRqLGhZn_vKFsOWZjOSBUd_0hmNw2FPfbA@mail.gmail.com>
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Replying to my own message, I add more below... On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 8:44 PM, Zaphod Beeblebrox <zbeeble@gmail.com> wrote= : > I have had diskless FreeBSD machines before. =A0I 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. =A0192.168.0.52 > is my NFS server. =A0The new vmware guest is bridged and gets > 192.168.0.135. =A0It successfully gets 'pxeboot' onto the vmware guest > --- pxeboot prints it's banner. =A0Then 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. ... With a few more variations of this test, I came across a configuration where the pxeboot client loaded into the vmware system would continue to spam the "options next-server" host to mount "/" ... interestingly here, it seems to completely ignore "options root-path" ... both the ip address and the path portions alike. ... but said behavior only occurs with some set of random configuration changes on the returned DHCP packets and/or slightly different versions of pxeboot (which I've pulled from various hosts from 8.x through the 9.x that I'm trying to boot with. It strikes me that the pxeboot process is hanging somewhere ... or overwriting memory ... or somesuch ... on this box. Has anyone seen or investigated this type of behavior?
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