[syslinux] pxelinux problem

H. Peter Anvin hpa at zytor.com
Tue Jul 16 17:39:51 PDT 2002


Eric P. McCoy wrote:
> 
> Note that it's not trying to load the kernel image at all.  It did
> occur to me that this might be one of the tftpd-related problems
> mentioned in the docs, but unfortunately, the docs are extremely thin
> on what non-Linux tftpds _do_ work correctly (presumably because you
> don't know).
>

What gave you the impression that they were "Linux" tftpds?  tftp-hpa,
in particular, should run on anything vaguely Unixlike.

> Since my boot server runs FreeBSD, I'm afraid I can't
> use either of the options the docs mention as being known to work
> correctly.  My choices appear to be yale-tftpd-3.0 (the one I'm using
> now) and utftpd-0.2.4.  The man page says nothing on the subject
> (blocksize and such), and I don't know how else I would find out if my
> tftpd supports it.  It seems like a hard reset with no error message
> and no delay (regardless of what I say in the configuration file) is
> pretty extreme for an error condition anyway, which makes me think
> this might be a bug of some kind.

That is somewhat odd, yes.  It shouldn't do that.

> Regarding hardware compatibility and possible brokenness, I have an
> eepro100+ with the onboard PXE boot ROM version 0.99.  It actually
> works quite well with the FreeBSD pxeboot image, but I'd rather go
> back to Linux.

Those early PXE boot ROMs are buggy as hell.  If this is a standalone
card (as opposed to something on the motherboard) I would immediately
upgrade it to the latest version from Intel.

> Is there anything else I can check?

Try tftp-hpa.

	-hpa




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