[syslinux] Chainloading pxe boot loaders and dhcp root-path option

Matt Fioravante fmatthew5876 at gmail.com
Sun May 15 00:27:34 PDT 2011


I've tried playing around with gpxe, and just now (I hadn't heard of it
before) ipxe. No matter how I try to change the root path, freebsd only gets
a root path if it was originally set in the dhcp server options.

I think its doing a dhcp request after it boots to get this information. I
can't verify that completely because I don't have a box I can stick in
between to snoop packets, but there doesn't seem to be any other explanation
as to why its ignoring my changes to the root-path option in g/ipxe.

I think I'm pretty much screwed, unless I use some rediculus hack like
changing the mac address to some fixed value and having the dhcp server give
a special dhcp-root-path option for that machine.

On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 2:54 AM, Geert Stappers <stappers at stappers.nl>wrote:

> On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 12:14:29AM -0400, Matt Fioravante wrote:
> > Is there anyway to set dynamically set dhcp options when chain loading
> > another pxe boot loader?
> >
> > I'm setting up a pxelinux network install server and one operating system
> I
> > want to support is freebsd.
> >
> > Freebsd has its own pxe loader called pxeboot that you can use. You just
> > have to boot it from tftp and set the root-path dhcp option (option 17)
> to
> > the location of your nfs server with the kernel and network filesystem.
> >
> > I want to support multiple versions of freebsd (i386 and amd64) along
> with
> > Linux distros and others. The are hackish ways to accomplish this using
> > memdisk, but thats not a great idea if you want to have a 280MB live cd
> > image. The most elegant way I can see to do this is to chain load
> freebsd's
> > pxeboot loader from pxelinux. The problem is when you do this, the dhcp
> > root-path option is not set and defaults to /.
> >
> > I need to be able to dynamically change this dhcp option before chain
> > loading into the next pxe boot loader. Essentiallly, I'd like to be able
> to
> > do something like this:
> >
> > LABEL fbsd32
> > pxe pxeboot.0 dhcp-root-path=/nfsserv/freebsd/i386/root
> >
> > LABEL fbsd64
> > pxe pxeboot.0 dhcp-root-path=/nfsserv/freebsd/amd64/root
> >
> > Is this at all possible with pxelinux?
>
> AIUI is the scripting of iPXE wanted, http://ipxe.org/scripting
> Setting root-path is not enumrated at http://ipxe.org/cmd/set
> However root-path is seen in the screenshot at http://ipxe.org/cmd/config
>
>
> Groeten Stappers
> --
> > And is there a policy on top-posting vs. bottom-posting?
> Yes.
>
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