[syslinux] Strange behavior

[Roy Marantz]

On 11/18/11 8:04 PM, "Gene Cumm" <gene.cumm at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 18, 2011 at 08:42, Roy Marantz <roy.marantz at vonage.com> wrote:
...
>> I've done more testing and I agree with you that the issue is due to
>> something in the networks involved in my setup.  I've tried using a VM on
>> other networks and had everything work as expected.  I will be looking into
>> that with our networking group.
> 
> I'd call that good news/bad news.  Good that you have a direction; bad
> that there's something still failing.  I'd still be curious at a
> packet capture, more to make sure gPXE and PXELINUX are behaving as
> expected, in light of the underlying networking issue (retries and
> all).
The packet capture didn't show, but Ill have to do them again and look more
closely.

>> I'd appreciate hearing any suggestions for how to eliminate any of the
>> downloads (gpxelinux, menu.pl, menu.c32, menu.pl) that my current procedure
>> uses.  I know that I can tell Vmware to use gpxelinux.0 in place of it
>> native pxe code, but I need to check on the supportability of that.  I.e.
>> Will Vmware balk at supporting such a change.  I was hoping to eliminate the
>> 2nd menu.pl download.
> 
> I don't believe you can tell a VM to use alternate code very easily,
> especially gpxelinux.0 (which depends on the underlying UNDI) or a VM
> on ESXi.  The best suggestion I can think of is replacing the first
> config file with a tiny static config that does something like "UI
> menu.c32 menu.pl".  Transfer/parsing would be mildly faster and your
> httpd might also be a little faster (but probably not enough to really
> notice).
So you are saying I should replace gpxelinux.0 builtin behaviour of
automatically loading pxelinux.0.  The only ways of doing that that I know
of are to use undionly.0 (from gpxe distribution) with some dhcpd.conf magic
or rebuild gpxelinux.0 with a different builtin script.

Am I missing something?  I was trying to avoid using code from gpxe since it
is hard to make it work with syslinux 4.04 and I didn't really want to build
syslinux from the source.
Thanks.
Roy