Re: using pxeboot

["George Georgalis" <george@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Aug 16, 2004 at 10:40:56PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
>    The pxeboot we generate is entirely untested.  I don't know if 
>    that has anything to do with your problem, though.

I've been using my setup to pixboot the OpenBSD installer successfully
and that required a boot.conf in tftproot/boot with 'boot bsd.rd'
specified, a ram disk of the installer filesystem. I haven't seen a
dragonfly pixboot ramdisk, but it doesn't seem to try to load one
either, it tries to do something but it times out after several minutes
and says something about not being able to load a kernel, though it's
where it should be relative to the tftpd root, I verified with the tftp
client that I can get files. The network seems setup correctly at this
point, per the display, but the tftpd logs don't indicate any file
requests for the kernel, ram disk or anything else from the pxe client.

On OpenBSD, I don't recall if I created the etc directory but I did have
to create the boot.conf file, for whatever reason.

$ cat ../OpenBSD/3.5/i386/etc/boot.conf 
boot bsd.rd
$ ls -F ../OpenBSD/3.5/i386/
CKSUM          bsd           comp35.tgz    floppyC35.fs  pxeboot
INSTALL.i386   bsd.rd        etc/          game35.tgz    xbase35.tgz
INSTALL.linux  bsd.rd-a.out  etc35.tgz     index.txt     xfont35.tgz
MD5            cd35.iso      floppy35.fs   man35.tgz     xserv35.tgz
base35.tgz     cdrom35.fs    floppyB35.fs  misc35.tgz    xshare35.tgz
$ ls -lF ../OpenBSD/3.5/i386/{pxeboot,bsd.rd}
-r--r--r--    1 geo      geo       4605537 Apr  6 12:59 ../OpenBSD/3.5/i386/bsd.rd
-r--r--r--    1 geo      geo         53328 Apr  6 12:59 ../OpenBSD/3.5/i386/pxeboot
$ file ../OpenBSD/3.5/i386/{pxeboot,bsd.rd}
. ./OpenBSD/3.5/i386/pxeboot: data
. ./OpenBSD/3.5/i386/bsd.rd:  ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, not stripped

>    I would leave the tftp directory at its default chroot, "/tftpboot",
>    and copy the necessary files into that directory.

I'm using tftpd-hpa from the linux debian distribution, since I don't
run inet.d, I don't really have default chroot, I just start from
command line....

/usr/sbin/in.tftpd -l -s /cdrom -v -v -v
or
/usr/sbin/in.tftpd -l -s /home/geo/OpenBSD/3.5/i386 -v -v -v

I would like to be able to do automated pxeboot installs (eg modify a
dragonfly.rd) but I have no pressing need at this time, I just used the
cd, and that installer is really awesome!

// George

-- 
George Georgalis, Architect and administrator, Linux services. IXOYE
http://galis.org/george/  cell:646-331-2027  mailto:george@xxxxxxxxx
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