[syslinux] Strange behavior

[Gene Cumm]

On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 08:30, Roy Marantz <roy.marantz at vonage.com> wrote:
> 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.

Things like did gPXE get an HTTP 404, socket closed, etc.

>>> 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.

Not at all.  Set DHCP option 209 to static.conf where static.conf
contains "UI menu.c32 menu.pl" and possibly some small simple fallback
options.

> 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

-- 
-Gene