[syslinux] Chain-loading from WDS to PXELinux on a different tftp server

[Geert Stappers]

On Mon, Dec 29, 2014 at 08:47:54AM +0100, Luke Ledgerd wrote:
> 
> Thanks for your email. Yes it does provide some insight into why I could
> hack a Linux DHCP server into providing enough PXE boot information
> for PXE 3 clients but PXE 2.1 were happy (ROMs under many circumstances
> need to use proxy dhcp 4011 - as documented by IBM on the link I shared
> earlier).

Please (re?)post that link.


> It appears only the most latest Dell business systems have EFI 64 support,
> and the best you can expect from models 2-3 years old is Legacy PXE ROM
> and only EFI support for booting from USB/HDD - correct me if I'm wrong.
> 
> Moving on from that we NEED to use WDS as we have chosen SCCM+WDS to do
> our MSFT deployments.
> Many people say SCCM / Windows PE is "flakey" (source whirlpool.net.au)
> but orders are orders. It does automate the deployment of masses of
> Microsoft workstations, provided you spend twice as long fiddling with
> the task sequences etc http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/2034700
> 
> "Pity that SCCM has got pxeboot.com hard coded in SMS pe.dll (the usual
> MSFT vision of the world, us or nothing...)"
> http://reboot.pro/topic/20145-pxe-chain-sccm-2012-r2-wds/
> Hence why we don't use SCCM to manage "unknown computers",
> but let WDS take over.
> 
> The goal to use the other TFTP server is because it's a NAS and it's
> fast. The SCCM server on Hyper-V + iscsi back to the same NAS, it's
> improving year by year.
> 
> I think I'd like to ask for a feature request to allow pxechn.c32 to
> work with EFI too

Please start a new thread for that request.


>  and to have the ability for PXELinux to have a ROOT
> path variable (kind of like gpxelinux.0) that can either have HTTP or
> TFTP urls. That would be a very useful addition to PXELinux.
> 
> Because of this I'm going to have to move over all the work setting up a
> nice PXELinux boot menu with all our support tools and goodies over to
> the WDS \RemoteInstall folder and have Microsoft NTFS file system over
> iscsi be use deploying everything. I would give my left arm to avoid
> that if I could.
> 
> Peter, your thoughts?
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Luke


Groeten
Geert Stappers
-- 
Leven en laten leven