[syslinux] KEEPPXE/DOS

[H. Peter Anvin]

Jonathan Hurd wrote:
> First off I love syslinux and it has worked flawless for us on the unix side of the realm.
> 
> 
> We're trying to use our ghost images within a dos netboot using syslinux. Unfortunatly we can only pass DHCP ip's to hosts that exhibit a vendor code 'like windows/pxe/and other os's do". Unfortunatly DOS does not, so we cannot request a second IP after the pxe process to map samba shares. From what I've read you can use the 'keeppxe' line and call the orrignal ip information recieved durning the pxe boot process? Is that correct, and if so how would I do that. 
> 
> 
> If that is not the case and I can keep around universal pxe stack to load dhcp again so that it exhibts a vendor code, how could I do that?
> 
> Basicaly I need a way to map a samba share after the netboot, and I would need an ip address on the network to do that. This would be an automated process so I cant just enter a static... has to be a dhcp enabled one, or one handed from the pxe process...

Ultimately this is a question about the DOS networking stack you're 
using, not about SYSLINUX, which makes it difficult to answer.

With the "keeppxe" option, syslinux will keep the PXE stack loaded (it 
eats up a LOT of low memory, however.)  If you're using MEMDISK, an 
alternative is to specify "ipappend 1" and then use the MEMDISK query 
API to get the ip= line from the memdisk saved command line.

The keeppxe option has the advantage that you can use an UNDI driver in 
DOS, which means your networking is hardware-independent... as long as 
you're willing to lose 64-128K of DOS memory.

	-hpa