[syslinux] Strange behavior

[Gene Cumm]

Sorry, I must have misread things at first.  You're talking VMware
ESX(i) 4.1.0 with vCenter 4.1.0 (irrelevant) using Syslinux-4.04.  I
thought you had somehow also meant Syslinux-4.10-pre* was having
issues but 4.04 worked.

Version strings can be confusing sometimes.

On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 15:23, Roy Marantz <roy.marantz at vonage.com> wrote:
>> There's a race condition with at least some VMware products that I solved
>> last month.  HPA committed the fixes to the lwip branch but I don't believe
>> he's released a new 4.10 prerelease yet.
>
> I'll try using a physical box to see if it makes a difference.
> Assuming that works, is the patch available against 4.04 or how stable is
> 4.10-pre?  I'd like to use this in production soon.
>
>>> What might cause menu.c32.{0,com,cbt,c32} to be requested?
>
>> Default name fallback mechanism.  If it can't find the specified file,
>> attempt appending certain extensions.
> That makes sense except that the real filename was never requested.

Have you tried a packet capture on the vSwitch?  It's possible the
first request is sent but there's an error.

> On 11/16/11 5:04 PM, "Gene Cumm" <gene.cumm at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Nov 16, 2011 3:35 PM, "Roy Marantz" <roy.marantz at vonage.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm using syslinux 4.04 with dynamically generated menus configuration
>> based
>>> on info found in various web pages.  I'm doing my testing using a vCetner
>>> 4.10 Vmware virtual machine.  This works some of the time, but not always.
>>> I just copied the prebuilt modules from the syslinux 4.04 distribution for
>>> gpxelinx.0, menu.c32, reboot.c32, and pxelinux.0
>>
>> There's a race condition with at least some VMware products that I solved
>> last month.  HPA committed the fixes to the lwip branch but I don't believe
>> he's released a new 4.10 prerelease yet.
>>
>>> When I boot a machine dhcpd says to boot gpxelinux.0 with
>>> pxelinux.pathprefix "http://10.250.50.72/tftpboot/gpxe/" and
>>> pxelinux.configfile "menu.pl" so that menu.pl generates the real
>>> configuration information for the chain loaded pxelinux.0.
>>>
>>> I see the startup messages from gpxelinux.0 and pxelinux 4.04, a message
>>> saying that menu.pl was loaded OK, and the output of  a SAY statement in
>> the
>>> generated configuration.
>>>
>>> In the generated configuration is a UI menu.c32 line and a few LABEL
>>> stanzas.
>>>
>>> I'm watching the logs from my apache server and see that sometimes it get
>>> requests for loading /tftpboot/gpxe/menu.c32.0, /tftpboot/gpxe/
>> menu.c32.com,
>>> /tftpboot/gpxe/menu.c32.cbt, or /tftpboot/gpxe/menu.c32.c32 before
>> aborting
>>> and saying:
>>> Could not find kernel image: menu.c32
>>> I can work around that by creating /tftpboot/gpxe/menu.c32.c32 or putting
>>> "UI menu" in the configuration file, but it still tries to load all the
>>> other files first.
>>>
>>> What might cause menu.c32.{0,com,cbt,c32} to be requested?
>>
>> Default name fallback mechanism.  If it can't find the specified file,
>> attempt appending certain extensions.
>>
>>> It seems to take a "long" time (say 30 seconds) between the time the SAY
>>> messages shows up and the menu is displayed?  Why?  That seems to be when
>> it
>>> is trying to load all the difference menu.c32 files.
>>
>> It takes a while for it to fail.

Take a look at your Apache HTTPd and a packet capture.  It's possible
that something is delaying the return of the error as I've seen things
progress much faster on my VMware platforms.

>>> BTW, I have a LABEL setup to use reboot.c32 and while that causes the boot
>>> process to restart, it only tries to load menu.0 and menu.com.  I'll worry
>>> about this later thought.
>>>
>>> Thanks for any help or ideas.
>>> Roy
>>
>> Hope this helps.

-- 
-Gene