[syslinux] PXE boot by MAC Vendor

[Clonch, Christopher A (Chris)]

I know this has been discussed many moons ago, but my search attempts on the mailing list archive and Google have not yielded any more information.  Here's my situation:

 

Currently all clients boot a generic "boot menu" which allows them to choose different images.  However I now have a PPC client that can not load the x86 complied pxelinux boot menu image.  So I now want to have a portion of the clients (right now just those PPC ones) boot a different image.  I figure that using the vendor portion of their MAC address, as mentioned here http://syslinux.zytor.com/archives/2005-May/005223.html <http://syslinux.zytor.com/archives/2005-May/005223.html> , would be the simplest way to accomplish this.  It seems this might be relatively easy to do using tftp-hpa (which I am using) and rewrite rules.  From the man pages I understand the rewrite rules file structure, but fail to see how to put it all together.

 

I assume the DHCP server (I am using ISC's) needs to pass the MAC information to tftpd.  How is this done?  Then I am guessing that tftpd, using the rewrite rules, changes the path/filename of the image to the correct one if the client's vendor matches the rewrite rule.  Correct?

 

Does anyone care to explain this to me in a little more detail?  Is their any other resources I could use to read up on making this work?  I am really good at following step-by-step directions! ;-)  Also I am using Gentoo if that helps.

 

Many thanks in advance,

-Chris