[syslinux] Consistent but intermittent DHCP problems after pxelinux loads kernel.

[Eli Stair]

Question, testing the waters to see if anyone has input on this.  My 
summary belief is that I'm seeing a problem with the PXE bios code 
causing this issue.  I'm trying to find out what else I can do to 
confirm that, and rule out pxelinux/.  I'd like to get a confirmation 
that the use of pxelinux isn't a factor, as I'm not using 'keeppxe'.

I'm rolling out a couple hundred workstations, and using a pxelinux 
menu-driven update of the SBIOS and to do the OS install (SuSE 9.3). 
Hardware is HP xw9300 workstations,dual opteron, NVidia chipset and NIC. 
    The entire pxelinux-involved process works properly 100% of the 
time, DHCP, kernel loading, memdisk... etc.

The systems are showing one very improper behaviour:

Some significant portion of the time the DHCP OFFER is never REQUEST'ed, 
but DISC's and OFFERs keep flowing until it times out.  I've got packet 
captures of both successful and unsuccessful runs, with no difference in 
the decode results.  On failure, the client keeps requesting and 
ignoring the immediate offer that should be accepted is blindly ignored, 
and the 4- 8- 16- second retry is stepped through while the OFFER 
immediately comes through.

Looking at packet caps via a hub shared with the client, compared with 
the server logs shows nothing amiss.  This same exact image is 
successfully used to network install hardware from another vendor, as 
well as from a boot CD this same HP hardware.  The problem seems to 
recurr randomly, sometimes lasting a minute or two, sometimes hours.

Has anyone seen this or a similar issue on any configuration?  Any 
suggestions of something further I could try?  Thanks for any input.

Cheers,

/eli