[syslinux] Network booting FreeBSD with gpxelinx almost works (fwd)

[Gene Cumm]

On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 16:27, Gene Cumm <gene.cumm at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 26, 2010 at 11:50, Daniel Feenberg <feenberg at nber.org> wrote:
>>
>> We have been network booting FreeBSD for some time with pxeboot. But now we
>> would like to have menu of OSs to boot and got the idea somewhere that
>> gpxelinux could do that for us. We copied gpxelinux.0 from the syslinux-4.02
>> distribution and replaced pxeboot with "gpxelinux" in the dhcpd.conf file.
>> Indeed with a configuration file in pxelinux.cfg like this:
>>
>>  default freebsd
>>  label freebsd
>>    PXE pxeboot
>>
>> and the root path still specified as a DHCP option, FreeBSD 8.1 does boot.
>> If I replace the first line with:
>>
>>  UI menu.c32
>>
>> the client does display the menu but if one hits return to select the single
>> item offered the client merely hangs for a minute, then announces "boot
>> failure". I am guessing that once the UI is interposed, somehow the root
>> path isn't getting transmitted to pxeboot. All the other gpxelinux boot
>> kernels seem to expect the information about the root filesystem to be
>> specified in the pxelinux.cfg file, rather than in dhcpd.conf. Does anyone
>> have experience with this? The various web posting I have found linking
>> FreeBSD to gpxelinux are about installations from ISO files over the net.
>
> This sounds like it's an issue specific to menu.c32 and the kernel
> type PXE.  Have you tried creating a copy of pxeboot as pxeboot.0?
> If, somehow, menu.c32 is messing up and using the file extension as
> the kernel type or not passing the kernel type parameter properly,
> this might be an interim solution until another solution is found.


On Mon, Sep 27, 2010 at 17:12, Ferenc Wagner <wferi at niif.hu> wrote:
> Does this message come from pxeboot?
> Just an idea: can you try with pxelinux.0 instead of gpxelinux.0?


I just tested with both pxelinux.0 and gpxelinux.0 from 4.02 to load a
PXE file pxeboot (Syslinux-4.01 pxelinux.0 renamed) with and without
menu.c32 with everything working with an identical config when using
the boot file option of "/pxelinux.0", "pxelinux.0", or "2/pxelinux.0"
(another copy of some stuff in a new directory to test a prefix
theory).

What is the exact string specified as the boot file (I think DHCP
option 67, iirc)?

Also, it sounds like you used the official pre-compiled binaries from
Syslinux.  Is this correct?

-- 
-Gene