[syslinux] PXELinux sporadic hangs searching for config file

[Joe Mroczek]

Thank you for the quick response.

On 1/29/06, H. Peter Anvin <hpa at zytor.com> wrote:
>
> Joe Mroczek wrote:
> >
> > Ethereal shows the last NAK going across the wire. We has Intel come in
> and
> > look for issues within their boot agent and were able to trace the NAK
> all
> > the way up to pxelinux. Further they could not find any sign of
> corruption
> > of the PXE structure and the RX and TX routines in boot agent were still
> > running. For some reason pxelinux was still calling the RX routine as if
> it
> > was still expecting something.
> >
> > Any clues on how to either debug the root issue, or at least get
> PXELinux to
> > retry the failed transaction?
> >
>
> You've ended up at the command prompt, and
>

Where would I find the command prompt?  Neither my VGA nor serial console
show a  prompt. The last thing on the console is pxelinux reporting that it
is looking for the config file in the location that matches up to the last
NAK in the TFTP log.

pxelinux calls the recieve routine so that the PXE stack can respond to ARP.


 Makes sense. ARPs do still function when we are hung.

 The real question is why your server returns file not found.


The reason the TFTP server NAKs is that the file does not exist. We hang
before getting to the location of last resort which does exist in our setup.
I have never seen a NAK when searching for the config file that does exist "
pxelinux.cfg/default". Further it has not hung while downloading files.

However, it has been discussed that the default syslinux behaviour
> (command prompt) may not be appropriate for pxelinux.


I could see how that could be contentious. Why would we drop to command
prompt before trying all 10 possible file locations?

~joe