[ILUG] PXE

[Ronan Cunniffe]

On Thu, 29 Apr 2004, Paul Kelly wrote:

> Hi
>
> /etc/dhcp.conf
>
> group   {
>     use-host-decl-names       on;
>     option log-servers        10.0.0.27;
>
>     host ws001 {
>         hardware ethernet     00:C0:4F:24:2D:C6;
>         fixed-address         10.0.0.5;
>         filename              "/tftpboot/lts/vmlinuz-2.4.9-ltsp-5";

If vmlinuz-2.4.9 is a linux kernel, then this is your problem.

The linux kernel, last I heard, cannot boot via PXE directly.  You need
pxelinux, which is to Ethernet as syslinux is to floppies.

You download, not a kernel, but pxelinux binary, which then downloads
kernel, commandline arguments, ramdisk, and kitchen sink as appropriate.

I can't remember offhand where it is, but Mr. Google knows.

Anyway, our setup looks like:

(dhcpd.conf, relevant bit):

group {
        option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0;
        option routers <blah>;
        server-name "<blah.com";
        use-host-decl-names on;
        filename "pxelinux.0";
        host stpx01 { hardware ethernet 00:40:63:c0:35:0d;
                      fixed-address stpx01; }
}


(listing of the tftpboot dir, the dir mentioned in inetd.conf):

-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       593519 linux-rhine-initrd
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      3985023 linuxrootfs.gz
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        11300 pxelinux.0
drwxr-xr-x    2 root     root         4096 pxelinux.cfg/


(listing of the tftpboot/pxelinux.cfg dir):

lrwxr-xr-x    1 root     root           10 01-00-40-63-c0-35-0d -> eden_xterm
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root           98 eden_xterm


(eden_xterm is a text file containing):
PROMPT 0
DEFAULT linux-rhine-initrd
APPENDIP 1
APPEND initrd=linuxrootfs.gz ramdisk_size=16384 rw


Hope this helps,

Ronan