[syslinux] gpxelinux and cramfs

[Michael L Martin]

Hello all-

I'm very new to the whole idea of booting a machine from a network
server, so please go easy on me until I can get my head wrapped
around it all.

I have a boot image that I want to be able to serve over the wire to
client machines. I have a kernel and a file system image that I've
put on a USB stick, and it boots fine from there. However, I have
something strange happening when I try to serve it all across the
network with gpxelinux. The kernel seems to load and boot just fine.
The fsimage gets served up, and mounted. The newly booted system
then goes through its usual antics for a few seconds, and then I see
this on the console:

Activating swap...done.
Checking root file system...cramfs: bad compressed blocksize 281427494
fsck 1.40-WIP (14-Nov-2006)
fsck.cramfs: error while loading shared libraries: /usr/lib/libz.so.1: 
cannot read file data: Error 21
fsck died with exit status 127
failed (code 127).

The kernel and the fsimage are exactly the same on both the server and
on the USB stick. It all boots fine from the USB stick, but not via
gpxelinux.0 - what might I have done wrong here?

I'm using gpxelinux.0 and pxelinux.0 from the latest syslinux, which is
3.75 at the time of this writing.

Any help or hints would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Michael Martin